The

Political
Process
A collection
of political
writings from
across the
world

Kapil Arambam
http://kapilarambam.blogspot.com
March 2009

1
 Capitalism and socialism
Maurice Brinton of Solidarity outlines his view of traditional socialists, and libertarian socialists.
December 1968
W
hat is basically wrong with capitalism? Ask a number of socialists and
you will get a number of different answers. These will depend on their
vision of what social ism might be like and on their ideas as to what
political action is all about. Revolutionary libertarian socialists see these things
very differently from the trad “left”. This article is not an attempt to counterpoise
two conceptions of socialism and political action. It is an attempt to stress a facet
of socialist thought that is in danger of being forgotten.
When one scratches beneath the surface, “progressive” capitalists, liberals, Labor
reformists, “communist” macro-bureaucrats and Trotskyist mini-bureaucrats all
see the evils of capitalism in much the same way. They all see them as primarily
economic ills, flowing from a particular pattern of ownership of the means of
production. When Khrushchev equated socialism with “more goulash for
everyone” he was voicing a widespread view. Innumerable quotations could be
found to substantiate this assertion.
If you don’t believe that traditional socialists think in this way, try suggesting to one
of them that modern capitalism is beginning to solve some economic problems.
He will immediately denounce you as having “given up the struggle for socialism”.
He cannot grasp that slumps were a feature of societies that state capitalism
had not sufficiently permeated and that they are not intrinsic features of capitalist
society. “No economic crisis” is, for the traditional socialist tantamount to “no
crisis”. It is synonymous with “capitalism has solved its problems”. The traditional
socialist feels insecure, as a socialist, if told that capitalism can solve this kind of
problem, because for him this is the problem, par excellence, affecting capitalist
society.
The traditional “left” today has a crude vision of man, of his aspirations and his
needs, a vision molded by the rotten society in which we live. It has a narrow
concept of class consciousness. For them class consciousness is primarily
an awareness of “non-ownership”. They see the “social problem” being solved
as the majority of the population gain access to material wealth. All would be
well, they say or imply, if as a result of their capture of state power (and of their
particular brand of planning) the masses could only be ensured a higher level of
consumption. “Socialism” is equated with full bellies. The filling of these bellies is
seen as the fundamental task of the Socialist revolution.
Intimately related to this concept of man as essentially a producing and consuming
machine is the whole traditional “left” critique of laissez-faire capitalism. Many on
the “left” continue to think we live under this kind of capitalism and continue to
criticize it because it is inefficient (in the domain of production). The whole of John
Strachey’s writings prior to World War II were dominated by these conceptions.
His Why You Should Be a Socialist sold nearly a million copies - and yet the
ideas of freedom or self-management do not appear in it, as part of the socialist
Objective. Many of the leaders of today’s “left” graduated at his school, including
the so-called revolutionaries. Even the usual vision of communism, “from each
according to his ability, to each according to his needs”, usually relates, in the
minds of “Marxists” to the division of the cake and not at all to the relations of man
with man and between man and his environment.
For the traditional socialist “raising the standard of living” is the main purpose
2
of social change. Capitalism allegedly cannot any longer develop production
(Anyone ever caught in a traffic jam, or in a working class shopping area on
a Saturday afternoon, will find this a strange proposition.) It seems to be of
secondary importance to this kind of socialist that under modern capitalism
people are brutalised at work, manipulated in consumption and in leisure, their
intellectual capacity stunted or their taste corrupted by a commercial culture.
One must be “soft” it is implied, if one considers the systematic destruction of
human beings to be worth a big song and dance. Those who talk of socialist
objectives as being freedom in production (as well as out of it) are dismissed as
“Utopians”.
Were it not that misrepresentation -is now an established way of life on the “left”,
it would seem unnecessary to stress that as long as millions of the world’s
population have insufficient food and clothing, the satisfaction of basic material
needs must be an essential part of the socialist program (and in fact of any
social program whatsoever, which does not extol the virtues of poverty.) The
point is that by concentrating entirely on this aspect of the critique of capitalism
the propaganda of the traditional “left” deprives itself of one of the most telling
weapons of socialist criticism, namely an exposure of what capitalism does to
people, particularly in countries where basic needs have by and large been met.
And whether Guevarist or Maoist friends like it or not, it is in these countries,
where there is a proletariat, that the socialist future of mankind will be decided.
This particular emphasis in the propaganda of the traditional organisations is
not accidental. When they talk of increasing production in order to increase
consumption, reformists and bureaucrats of one kind or another feel on fairly safe
ground. Despite the nonsense talked by many “Marxists” about “stagnation of
the productive forces” bureaucratic capitalism (of both the Eastern and Western
types) can develop the means of production, has done so and is still doing so on
a gigantic scale. It can provide (and historically has provided) a gradual increase
in the standard of living - at the cost of intensified exploitation during the working
day. It can provide a fairly steady level of employment, so can a well-run gaol.
But on the ground of the subjection of man to institutions which are not of his
choice, the socialist critiques of capitalism and bureaucratic society retain all
their validity. In fact, their validity increases as modern society simultaneously
solves the problem of mass poverty and becomes increasingly bureaucratic and
totalitarian.
It will probably be objected that some offbeat trends in the “Marxist” movement
do indulge in this wider kind of critique and in a sense this is true. Yet whatever
the institutions criticized, their critique usually hinges, ultimately, on the notion
of the unequal distribution of wealth. It consists in variations on the theme of the
corrupting influence of money. When they talk for instance of the sexual problem
or of the family, they talk of the economic barriers to sexual emancipation, of
hunger pushing women to prostitution, of the poor young girl sold to the wealthy
man, of the domestic tragedies resulting from poverty. When they denounce what
capitalism does to culture they will do so in terms of the obstacles that economic
needs puts in the way of talent, or they will talk of the venality of artists. All this is
undoubtedly of great importance. But it is only the surface of the problem. Those
socialists who can only speak in these terms see man in much less than his full
stature. They see him as the bourgeoisie does, as a consumer (of food, of wealth,
of culture, etc.). The essential, however, for man is to fulfill himself. Socialism must enjoyment of his activity and even to make him accept this deprivation as
give man an opportunity to create, not only in the economic field but in all fields of something intrinsically good. In the past this job was assisted by religion. Today
human endeavor. Let the cynics smile and pretend that all this is petty-bourgeois the same role is played by “socialist” and “communist” ideologies. But man is not
utopianism. “The problem” Marx said, “is to organise the world in such a manner infinitely malleable. This is why the bureaucratic project will come unstuck; its
that man experiences in it the truly human, becomes accustomed to experience objectives are in conflict with fundamental human aspirations.
himself as a man, to assert his true individuality”.
We mention all this only to underline the essential identity of relations of
Conflicts in class society do not simply result from inequalities of distribution, or domination - whether they manifest themselves in the capitalist factory, in the
flow from a given division of the surplus value, itself the result of a given pattern patriarchal family, in the authoritarian upbringing of children or in “aristocratic”
of ownership of the means of production. Exploitation does not only result in a cultural traditions. We also mention these facts to show that the socialist revolution
limitation of consumption for the many and financial enrichment for the few. This will have to take all these fields within its compass, and immediately, not in some
is but one aspect of the problem. Equally important are the attempts by both far distant future.
private and bureaucratic capitalism to limit -- and finally to suppress altogether, the
human role of man in the productive process. Man is increasingly expropriated The revolution must of course start with the overthrow of the exploiting class and
from the very management of his own acts. He is increasingly alienated during all with the institution of workers’ management of production. But it will immediately
his activities, whether individual or collective. By subjecting man to the machine have to tackle the reconstruction of social life in all its aspects. If it does not, it
- and through the machine to an abstract and hostile will - class society deprives will surely die.
man of the real purpose of human endeavor, which is the constant, conscious
transformation of the world around him. That men resist this process (and that
their resistance implicitly raises the question of self-management) is as much
a driving force in the class struggle as the conflict over the distribution of the
surplus. Marx doubtless had these ideas in mind when he wrote that the proletariat
“regards its independence and sense of personal dignity as more essential than
its daily bread”.
Class society profoundly inhibits the natural tendency of man to fulfill himself
in the objects of his activity. In every country of the world this state of affairs is
experienced day after day by the working class as an absolute misfortune, as a
permanent mutilation. It results in a constant struggle at the most fundamental
level of production: that of conscious, willing participation. The producers utterly
reject (and quite rightly so) a system of production which is imposed upon them
from above and in which they are mere cogs. Their inventiveness, their creative
ability, their ingenuity, their initiative may be shown in their own lives, but are
certainly not shown in production. In the factory these aptitudes may be used,
but to quite different and “non productive” ends! They manifest themselves in a
resistance to production. This results in a constant and fantastic waste compared
with which the wastage resulting from capitalist crises or capitalist wars is really
quite trivial!

Alienation in capitalist society is not simply economic. It manifests itself in many

other ways. The conflict in production does not “create” or “determine” secondary
conflicts in other fields. Class domination manifests itself in all fields, at one and
the Same time. Its effects could not otherwise be understood. Exploitation, for
instance, can only occur if the producers are expropriated from the management
of production. But this presupposes that they are partly expropriated at least from
the capacities of management - in other words from culture. And this cultural
expropriation in turn reinforces those in command of the productive machine.
Similarly a society in which relations between people are based on domination
will maintain authoritarian attitudes in relation to sex and to education, attitudes
creating deep inhibitions, frustrations and much unhappiness. The conflicts
engendered by class society take Place in every one of us. A social structure
containing deep antagonisms reproduces these antagonisms in variable degrees
in each of the individuals comprising it.

There is a profound dialectical inter-relationship between the social structure of

a society and the attitudes and behavior of its members. “The dominant ideas
of each epoch are the ideas of its ruling class”, whatever modern sociologists
may think. Class society can only exist to the extent that it succeeds in imposing
a widespread acceptance of its norms. From his earliest days man is subjected
to constant pressures designed to mould his views in relation to work, to culture,
to leisure, to thought itself. These pressures tend to deprive him of the natural
3
 Theses On the
Chinese Revolution
and Cultural
Revolution
By Cajo Brendel Solidarity (U.K.) Pamphlet # 46 (1974)
Preface to the Second English Edition
T
he Theses on the Chinese Revolution were written during the spring and
summer of 1967, when China was in the threes of the so-called ‘Cultural
Revolution’. Information concerning these historic events was insufficient
at the time. The author nevertheless made an attempt at a social analysis, that
brought him to certain conclusions concerning the Chinese Revolution as a
whole. The author’s views differ fundamentally not only from those of the Maoists,
but also from those of all sorts of Leninists (Trotskyists included). Unlike what
they think-and in contradistinction too to bourgeois appreciations-the Theses
don’t accept that the political aims of the Chinese Communist Party determined
the Chinese events. On the contrary, those political aims and the events that
really occurred were both aspects of the stage of development of the Chinese
Revolution. This revolutionary process is none other than the transition from pre-
capitalist forms of production into a modern society, based on wage-labour, and
on its way to something like state- capitalism.
The Theses on the Chinese Revolution were first published in Dutch in the monthly
Daad en Gedachte (Act and Thought’). in the spring of 1969 they were published
in France in Cahiers du Communisme de Conseils. In 1971 the first English edition
appeared as an Aberdeen Solidarity pamphlet. In 1973 an Italian edition was
published in Caserta. In one respect this second English edition is like the first; in
the Theses proper, nothing has been changed. Although the author resorted to
several sources, among them some well known sinologists, outstanding Chinese
communist writers (such as Mao himself), pamphlets (published in English in the
People’s Republic of China) and articles from Peking Review, he desisted from
footnotes. He preferred to convince, not by mentioning names or titles, but by the
inherent logic of the series of events that have been recorded.
True enough, many explanations could now be expanded on the basis of greater
knowledge. But to do so would have taken us far beyond the original character of
the Theses, although it would not have meant any fundamental reappraisal. The
new facts at the author’s disposal have not basically transformed his views. On
the contrary, as he sees it the latest developments in China have only confirmed
them.
This is best understood if one looks at two of his other writings, added here to the
primary text by way of introduction. The first deals with some aspects of Chinese
foreign policy. It was finished shortly after the restoration of diplomatic relations
between the
People’s Republic of China and the USA. The main point is a critical look at
Chou-En-lai’s attitude to the Ceylon and Bangladesh revolutions. The second
point-specially dealt with for this edition-describes the conflicts within the Chinese
Communist Party as they became apparent at its Tenth Congress and through
the anti-Confucius campaign. Both essays must be considered as a link between
the seven year old Theses and the present state of affairs. The author hopes that
they will contribute to making current events more easily understood.
4
Introduction (1974)
1) Some Reflections on the Counter-Revolutionary Nature of Chinese Diplomacy
In the last quarter of the eighteenth century the USA, under George Washington,
threw off the British colonial yoke. Even before the French people had made
their own middle-class revolution, the Americans had sent to the courts and
governments of a predominantly feudal* (*The British Kingdom (since the
revolutions of 1641 and 1688) and the Dutch Republic were the sole exceptions.)
Europe their own diplomatic representatives.
To the Paris court of Louis XVI there came in this role one of America’s most able
ambassadors: none other than Benjamin Franklin. In the preceding years he had
not only been a red-hot champion of American independence, but he had also
acquired an international reputation as a physical scientist. In his person two
things found themselves combined. He was enveloped in the lustre of the young
Transatlantic Republic which, by its very existence, announced to the absolutist
princes that their reign had come to an end. On the other hand, Franklin was the
personification of pure science, unobstructed by ecclesiastical dogma. Technical
progress, based on the new science, had enabled the rising bourgeoisie to build
up its own forms of` production in countries that were still dominated by the
nobility and clergy.
The fact that it was Benjamin Franklin who had set foot on the French shore
as the ambassador of the despised American Republic, had to be tolerated by
the worn out order. It also stimulated the self-consciousness of the French Third
Estate. The stimulus was made even stronger by the behaviour of this diplomatic
representative of the early. American employers.
Benjamin Franklin had always led a simple life. This was, on the one hand,
the result of puritanism (the product of rising capitalism). On the other, it was
explicable by the demands of thrift, created by the problem of accumulation in
a country of middle-class pioneers. Franklin would never have dreamt of giving
up his way of life, after moving to the extravagant neighbourhood of the French
royal household. He went about Paris and Versailles in a dress readily recognised
by all as Third Estate garb. He wore his clothes with the same pride with which
the marquesses and dukes of France wore their silk coats. Deeply convinced
that his middle-class country-and the republican form of government-represented
the future, Franklin forced, by his appearance, the French nobility to honour his
personality. In the process, he also forced it to recognise a new class, that was
laying an increasing claim to its rightful position in society.
Acting in this manner, Franklin gave an example of revolutionary diplomacy that
the world has never seen since. He could be characterised as a middle-class
prove. He daily defied his detested class enemy and put new heart into his French
class-comrades. Later (after the bourgeois revolution had triumphed in France
and elsewhere) such a conduct totally lost its meaning. The bourgeoisie, itself
becoming the ruling class, was no longer engaged in revolutionary practice. It
started imitating the manners and style of its former class enemy. Nothing could
be found anymore of revolutionary diplomacy.
Much later, the world was led for a moment to believe that the Russian Bolsheviks
(in different circumstances but in a similar way) had repeated what Benjamin
Franklin had done to intimidate the nobility and to activate the Third Estate. In
March 1918, when the Soviet government was negotiating at Brest-Litovsk with
German imperialism, the Muscovite representatives came to this Polish town
with working-class caps and peasant fur coats. Bolshevik Russia had barely
introduced the New Economic Policy, had scarcely taken the road to state-
capitalism, than its diplomats started behaving just as the official representatives
of a state-capitalist republic might be expected to do. The delegation that sat at
Brest-Litovsk, in front of the German imperial generals, was composed of political
idealists. When idealism had gone, and the bourgeois character of the Russian
Revolution had become obvious, the suits of the Russian diplomats became as
starched and conventional as one can imagine. At the same time, the thoroughly
bourgeois character of Russian foreign policy and the bourgeois traits of Russian
diplomacy appeared.
It is not hard to illustrate this with some examples. In feudal, pre-revolutionary
France, Benjamin Franklin would have guarded himself against the smallest
gesture that might have been understood as a sign of alliance or sympathy
with those in power. On the other hand, the diplomats of state- capitalist
Russia (at the time of Lenin and Trotsky, as well as at the time of Stalin and his
successors) displayed day after day their inner affinity with capitalism and with
the bourgeoisie.
Chicherin, as a People’s Commissar for foreign relations, expressed his warm
sympathy towards the liberal German Secretary of State, Dr. Stresemann, over
the death of President Ebert (a man who once declared that he ‘hated revolution
like sin’). Later on there were many expressions of sympathy at the death of other
dignitaries of the European middle-class. The Kremlin diplomats kept up very
friendly relations with Chiang Kai-Shek and with Kemal Pasha, while the latter
respectively massacred Chinese and Turkish communists. Representatives of the
Kremlin honoured Mussolini, Churchill, and Roosevelt. They entered into a pact
with Hitler. In the early thirties they made their way into the League of Nations,
which in their revolutionary heyday they had called the ‘thieves kitchen’.
From where did these clear and important differences with the revolutionary
diplomacy of Benjamin Franklin arise? The explanation is simple. Franklin in
eighteenth century France was surrounded by his class enemies. The diplomats
of state- capitalist Russia moved in middle-class Western Europe, among people
of a similar political and social background. Far from having made diplomatic
or psychological mistakes, the Russian representatives did just what they were
expected to do.
For some time the Russian (bourgeois) revolution seemed to have great
consequences for similar bourgeois developments in Asia and Africa. Bolsheviks,
like the previously mentioned Chicherin, or like Borodin (who in the twenties
was the political adviser to the Chinese Kuo Min Tang) were political idealists.
They dreamed of an anti-colonial struggle in which Eastern peoples would strike
a heavy blow at Western capitalism. But this dream had one pre-condition: the
political idealists in Russia needed the reassurance that they would not suddenly
and horribly be awoken from another dream, the dream that they weren’t living,
anyhow, in a capitalist country.
As soon as the capitalist nature of Bolshevik society came to the fore, the time for
political dreams came to an end. The political idealists made way for the realists.
Instead of illusions about revolutionary support for Asia or Africa there came
5
the reality of bestowing favours upon that particular class in Eastern society that
tended to slow down the break- through of modern capitalism (with the aid of
western imperialism). This harmonised better with Russia’s own interests and with
the foreign policy which the Kremlin had opted for ever since 1921.
So it is today with Chinese foreign policy and Chinese diplomacy. The Chinese
Revolution had essentially (not in details) the same character as that in Russia in
1917. There may indeed be differences between Moscow and Peking, but China
just like Russia is on its way to state-capitalism. Just as Moscow does, Peking
pursues a foreign policy that has little to do with revolution elsewhere in Asia (not
even middle-class revolution).
Like Russia in the thirties, modern Maoist China has for over 20 years been
seeking membership of the United Nations. Chinese foreign policy is not directed
at the stimulation of the bourgeois revolution throughout the rest of Asia and in
Africa. It is directed at obtaining alliances. It is a policy in which Mao Tse-tung and
Chou En-lai display as little finesse as Stalin and Litvinov displayed in their time.
The true character of Chinese foreign policy and of Chinese diplomacy can
be seen in the light of two examples drawn from very recent history. We mean
Peking’s attitude to the revolutionary events in Ceylon and Pakistan respectively.
In Ceylon, where the coalition government of the so-called United Left Front
under Prime Minister Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike clashed with the revolutionary
movement that stood for a state-capitalist future, Peking did not take the side of
the revolutionaries. It gave full support to Mrs. Bandaranaike. The same happened
in Pakistan when a civil war broke out between the reactionary feudal dictatorship
of General Yahya Khan and the population of East Pakistan. The armed revolt
in East Pakistan was the desperate answer to the colonial exploitation of the
country by the West Pakistan clique. It was directed against the pattern of large
landownership and against social conditions that intentionally kept the country
backward. Sheik Mujibur Rahman headed the uprising for a short time. Even if
the insurrection had not been beaten down, he never could have maintained that
position. Behind him (and behind the social forces that he represented) more
radical forces were looming up, just as in Russia. The Bolsheviks had loomed up
behind those political forces that had emerged after the February Revolution.
However, the coming to power of Sheik Mujibur would have meant progress
compared to the brutal rule of Yahya Khan, who was linked with imperialism. (We
speak of course of progress within the framework of bourgeois development.)
Mujibur called himself` a ‘socialist’. Neither he nor those who are called on to
complete the East Pakistan revolution deserve any such denomination. Neither in
East nor West Pakistan was socialism on the agenda. Sheik Mujibur represents
the East Pakistani bourgeoisie. This bourgeoisie is weak, just as it is in most Asian
countries. That explains why middle-class revolution in this part of the world tends
to be enacted in forms that first manifested themselves in Russia, and later in
China.
If-and for convenience only-anyone wanted to give names to the actors in the
Pakistan drama, one might call Sheik Mujibur a Menshevik. One might designate
as Bolsheviks the revolutionary forces in the background, to which Tariq All, the
London political writer, belongs. General Yahya Khan could be compared to
some Tsarist general or other, perhaps to a Kornilov (a Kornilov successful in the
western part of Ids bi-partite country but who ran up against serious resistance
ill its eastern half).
Peking-whose policy is our subject-didn’t support the Pakistan ‘Bolsheviks’.
It didn’t even support the ‘Menshevik’ Sheik Mujibur. Peking gave diplomatic,
political and military aid to the Pakistan ‘Kornilov’, General Yahya Khan. The
Chinese Minister for Foreign Affairs, Chou En-lai, sent a message to Yahya Khan
that was first published in the Peking Review, then in the Pakistan Times (the
mouth-piece of the reactionary West Pakistan government). In this message Chou
En-lai declared: ‘Your Excellency and leaders of various quarters in Pakistan have
done a lot of useful work to uphold the unification of Pakistan and to prevent
it from moving towards a split. We believe that through the wise consultations
and efforts of Your Excellency and leaders of various quarters in Pakistan, the
situation in Pakistan will certainly be restored to normal. In our opinion the
unification of Pakistan and the unity of the people of East and West Pakistan are
the basic guarantees for Pakistan to attain prosperity and strength.’ The meaning
was clear enough: Peking was opposed to the national, middle-class uprising
in East Pakistan. The People’s Republic of China considered the East Pakistan
(bourgeois) revolutionaries as ‘a handful of persons who want to sabotage the
unification of Pakistan’(1) Hence Chou’s words in the quoted message.
China, as we have said, did more. She supplied the counter-revolutionary
government of Yahya Khan with weapons and equipment. These weapons-tanks
made in China-were not only used against the East Pakistan insurgents. They
were also used against West Pakistan workers, fighting a class-struggle against
their rulers.
In other words Chinese policy towards Pakistan was just like Moscow’s policy
towards China in the late twenties. At that time Russian aid enabled Chang Kai-
shek to massacre the workers of Shanghai. General Yahya Khan massacred the
Pakistani workers with Chinese aid.
At a public meeting in Amsterdam the West Pakistani Trotskyist, Tariq All, pointed
out these facts. The Dutch Maoists present were scandalised. Evidently they
hadn’t yet read Chou En-lai’s letter to Yahya Khan, a letter that had appeared in
the Peking Review. They behaved like Stalinists in the thirties, unaware of Stalin’s
latest changes of line. A Maoist sympathiser, writing in the British paper New
Society(and much better informed about what had really happened), suggested
that the Chinese might have backed Yahya for ‘long- term motives’, namely to
enable him to smash the (‘Menshevik’)Awarmi League of Sheik Mujibur and pave
the way for the Bengal left. (2) One might ask such a simpleton why Lenin in 1917
didn’t back Kornilov, thereby Enabling him (Lenin) to settle with the Kerensky
government, after a successful coup!
Tariq Ali doesn’t talk such nonsense. He considers Chinese foreign policy towards
Ceylon and Pakistan as ‘wrong’ policies. We reject his Bolshevik opinions. We
see the policy that we denounce as the logical consequence of the state-capitalist
character of the Chinese Republic.
The latest example of this-strictly logical-policy is the Chinese approach to the
United Nations and the USA. Peking wants to keep up good relations with both.
(3) When a number of young supporters of the American left (and sympathisers
of Mao) were recently in Peking, Chou En-lai made it clear to them that their
resistance to Nixon was, of course, just their own problem. China was looking for
friendly relations with the White House. Such an attitude is similar to Moscow’s
attitude to Hitler and to Mussolini. It is the cynical policy of diplomatic zig-zags
in front of the worst enemies of the working-class. Neither Mao nor Chou En-lai
can be blamed for it, for they are not in office to promote the interests of the
Chinese working-class. They are in office to promote the interests of Chinese
state-capitalism. It is not they, the Chinese leaders, who are going the ‘wrong way’.
Those who are on the wrong path are those who expect a revolutionary policy or
revolutionary diplomacy from Maoist China.
2) The Tenth Congress of the Chinese Party and After
If anyone wishes to characterise the play acted behind closed doors in Peking
last summer (under the title of ‘Tenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party’)
he would have to define it as a ‘Comedy of Errors’. Although a mere spectator, he
6
would feel like another Duke Solinus who, surrounded by two pairs of twins, didn’t
know which was which.
Wasn’t there the Chinese Foreign Secretary, Chou En-lai, declaring that ‘the
struggle of the Asian, African and Latin American peoples to obtain or defend
national independence was deepening and enlarging as the result of an irresistible
historical trend’? Didn’t Chou simultaneously express his ‘solidarity with oppressed
nations all over the world, those countries that were exposed to tyranny and
domination’ and deplore what he called ‘the mutilation of Pakistan’ caused by (a
fact, of course, which he didn’t mention) a social uprising for autonomy, a social
uprising that he (Chou En-lai himself) had vainly helped to suppress? From such
words ordinary people might conclude that by Chinese standards ‘solidarity with
the oppressed’ doesn’t mean what it means to the oppressed themselves. They
might conclude that behind the walls of Peking reigns a confusion of tongues.
That first impression would be strengthened by everything the Congress revealed
about what was logically its main concern: the Chinese scene itself.
On that score the Congress attached the greatest possible importance to the
doings of the late Lin Piao, once Chairman Mao’s ‘close comrade in arms’. Killed in
a plane crash as he was flying to Russia on September 13 1971 (and consequent-
ly dead for two years), Lin Piao’s ghost overshadowed the Peking conference.
The meeting so remembered him, and was so dominated by his personality, that
the 1249 delegates even proceeded to expel him from the party ‘once and for all’,
as if he were still in the world of the living. Wasn’t it confusing that this man, Lin
Piao, who as recently as a year before had been posthumously charged with ‘left-
extremism’, was now being called a ‘right-wing criminal’ who had always (!) had a
bourgeois outlook and who had aim- ed at the restoration of capitalism in China.
(Incidentally, the forms of production existing in China, based on wage-slavery,
didn’t need such a ‘restoration’, being in their very essence capitalist.
Wasn’t it even more confusing that Lin Piao (a fervent champion of the so-called
‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’),whose rise to power had taken place
during and immediately after that political tempest that had strengthened the
Party’s position, could have been described as the leader of an anti-Party group?
Liu Shao-chi, Lin Piao’s opponent in those crucial years from 1966 to 68, and
against whom the whole weight of the Party had been launched, was on the other
hand merely described as a ‘revisionist’, serious as such a charge may be. Wasn’t
it embarrassing that Wang Hung-wen, a young Shanghai worker who played an
important role in the battle against that former head of state, Liu Shao-chi, was
chosen as one of the five (instead of one) Vice-Chairmen of the Party, and as a
member of its Central Committee, only to be confronted outside the meeting by
former political friends of Liu, like Teng Chiau-ping, rehabilitated as were many
others of his kind, despite a frontal attack on Liu Shao-chi by Chou En-lai?
One can’t avoid asking what, in the Chinese jargon, terms like ‘socialism’ and
‘capitalism’, ‘revisionism’ and ‘anti-Party clique’ really mean. Can it be that the
confusion of tongues in Peking is as great as it was in state-capitalist Russia in
the early sixties, when the Moscow leaders were fighting out their differences
hidden behind deceptive definitions? Didn’t the same abuse of ‘anti-Party groups’
indicate on that occasion something very different from what one might have
expected? Indeed, a short but close examination of those mimic-battles is very
useful to clarify their present Chinese counterpart. The spectacular Russian play
had been preceded by another. In the twenties and thirties the contradiction
between social reality and Bolshevik reality had given rise to a theoretical
discussion about Leninist thought, the real issue of which was the class structure
of the so-called soviet state. In the early sixties the interpretation of Leninism
wasn’t at issue. Though Leninism (whatever that happened to be) remained the
official Bolshevik theory, its special social function (namely, to hold back the truth
about state-capitalist exploitation by discussing it in ‘socialist’ phraseology), had
become less urgent. Of course Leninism still supplied this ideological need, but
at the same time another need had come into being.
In the past the theoretical battles mainly reflected developing contradictions
between Russian workers and a new rising ruling class. By the second half of
the century, these contradictions had become a widespread reality. The new
ruling class was in the process of becoming a dominant and influential factor in
society. Against this social background Party traditions, born in entirely different
social circumstances, were felt to be theoretical humbug, a stumbling block in the
new class’s way to genuine development. The new ruling class could no longer
collaborate with a bureaucracy that indulged in practices in no way adapted to
the new situation, practices that hindered the development of production.
What the new class wanted was a more or less ‘new’ Bolshevik Party adapted
to the current situation, a Party that would recognise the new class’s powerful
position. The requirements of the new class led to an interesting struggle between
the old Party bureaucracy and the representatives of the factory management that
had come into being, and that formed the basis of the new class. The struggle
lasted many years. Both factions balancing one another, the outcome was for a
long time undecided. At one time the old Party held the strongest positions, at
other times the managerial faction did.
All this started in darkness, before Stalin’s death. It became visible in the post-
Stalin era. It reached its culminating point in the days of Khruschev, who won
power because he was the right man at that particular time. His personality-as his
biographer, George Paloczi-Horvath, wrote-was just as enigmatic as the Soviet
world. The true content of this enigma was that the Russian situation had produced
the unstable character of Nikita Sergeyevich Khruschev, and that conversely,
an unstable man like Khruschev (more than anyone else among government
notables), was suited to a situation in which neither the bureaucracy nor the new
ruling class could claima final victory. Khruschev was a misfit in the bureaucracy
to which he formally belonged. But he didn’t identify himself with the Russian
management, nor did the managerial strata regard him as a reliable supporter.
Perhaps just because of these qualities, Khruschev had an unmistakable feeling
about what was up. When his adversaries boxed his ears with quotations from the
dead Lenin. Kruschev pointed out that people were living in another time: what
was valid then had lost its value. With those words he accurately divulged what
was going on behind the scenes.
With Khruschev in office, the struggle between the new class and the old
Party reached its final stage. Lengthy trench warfare made way for a war of
movement. So often and so quickly did positions in the Kremlin change that
when Suslov and Mikoyan returned to Moscow from a short visit to Budapest
(where, as representatives of the new class, they were prepared for a flexible
attitude towards the government of Imre Nagy, to whom they had guaranteed
the withdrawal of Russian troops) they were confronted with an entirely different
mood.* (*Background information given by Tibor Meray in one of the most
interesting books on the Hungarian Revolution: Thirteen Days that Shook the
Kremlin (Thames & Hudson, 1958).)
During this period the attack from the new management on the Party traditionalists
became fiercer. The embarrassment provoked by its mystifying slogans was
greater than ever before. Those who favoured the domination of the new ruling
class over the old bureaucracy never tired of proclaiming their legal heritage from
the Party. At the same time the defenders of the Party (old style) were stigmatised
as the ‘anti-Party group’. What lay behind the slogans and stigmatisations was
clear enough in the debate (though it wasn’t carried on in plain Russian but in a
language one might define as Party-Chinese). We here give some quotations with
(in brackets) translations into everyday speech.
<em> KOSYGIN (member of the Presidium of the Central Committee, defending
7
management): ‘Members of the anti-Party group opposed everything that was
new or progressive. By such an attitude, in fact, they wrecked the economic
policy of the Party and of the country ... ‘ (‘The anti-Party group opposed the
rise of the new class of managers and wrecked its economic policy’).’They
were against any proposal that could have improved the soviet economy’ (‘They
opposed proposals not in accordance with the policy of the new class’). ‘Molotov
opposed the new economic and agricultural policy’ (‘Molotov was an adversary
of management’). MIKOYAN (the most outstanding champion of the new class):
‘They-the members of the anti-Party group-cling to conservative, dogmatic
points of view that prevent the introduction of innovations’ (‘They stood for the
past and opposed any accommodation to the reality of the growing power of
the new class’). ‘Molotov is the ideologist of bygone times’ (‘Molotov’s thought
is adapted to yesterday’s reality. That reality does not exist any longer because
of the increasing influence of the managerial class’). MOLOTOV (in defence of
the anti-Party group): ‘The Party’s new programme is a revisionist and counter-
revolutionary one’ (‘The Party’s new programme aims to make the Party a tool
of the new class. It transforms the principles of Stalinism. It is directed against
everything the old Party represented’). SATJUKOV: ‘Molotov has always been a
bungler in home affairs’ (‘Political knowledge is strictly reserved for the class
that has power and rules’). KHRUSCHEV: ‘The Soviet Union is in great need of
capital’ (‘The accumulation of capital doesn’t keep pace with the needs of the
new managerial class’).
Joining the debate in this way, Khruschev in fact took the victors’ side.’Long live
the new ruling class’ was the true meaning of his belated intervention. Before long
he found out that he had acted too late. He was dismissed as soon as the new
ruling class no longer felt itself seriously threatened. With Kosygin’s appointment
as Prime Minister there started a new chapter in Russian history. Could it be that
last year’s happenings in China resemble in some way what we have described
as happening in Russia? In present day China, too, there are forces at work more
or less favourable to the rise of a ‘new class’. Attempts to analyse these forces
have been made in the Theses. There is no need to repeat the argument. Nor is
it necessary again to explain-as was done in the Theses-why the Great Cultural
Revolution can be regarded as the response to social developments similar to
those that, in Russia, had strengthened managerial positions. There have been
many subsequent indications suggesting that the Cultural Revolution wasn’t as
successful as Chou En-lai would have had the delegates to the Tenth Congress
believe. Those social forces in the background which even if they didn’t give
rise to a ‘new class’ nevertheless prepared its way (pushing forward individual
managers), still exist. They proved themselves stronger than the violence of the
Red Guards and appeared to be totally interwoven with Chinese social relations.
However, unlike the ‘new class’ in Russia, its Chinese counterpart has not so far
proved stronger than the Chinese Party. In the course of the Cultural Revolution
the Party was transformed for the purpose of better resistance. Such facts should
be a warning against too simplified an analogy.
Things in China are not what they had previously been in Russia. Nevertheless,
the phenomenon of a (future) managerial class holds the key to every Chinese
problem. For instance, Chou En-lai was very clearly criticising the managerial point
of view in his speech to the Tenth Congress when he addressed himself to ‘those
who pretended that after the Ninth Congress (held in April 1969) the development
of production should be the Party’s main task’ and to those ‘who claimed that
it was not the antagonism between the working class and the bourgeoisie that
was the most important contradiction in China, but the contradiction between the
advanced socialist system and the backward productive forces in society’.
But in China things are far more complicated than this. The same Chou En-lai,
in the same speech, underlines the necessity for a ‘transformation of all parts of
the superstructure that are not co-ordinsted with the economic foundation’. That
sounds like a concession to managerial demands. Apparently matters were not
pushed to extremes. The forementioned presence of rehabilitated adherents of
managerial champion Liu Shao-chi and the fact that some of those men had
again been able to obtain influential positions in the country point in the same
direction.
The only possible explanation is that hitherto the pro- managerial and pro-
bureaucratic forces were balanced. One must not forget that these are not the
only social forces in China, where there is also a very large peasantry. Finally,
if the Party was reformed during the Cultural Revolution, partly in response to
the views of the peasants, it was just to take the wind out of the management’s
sails. To conclude: the antagonism between the Party and the new class in China
hasn’t by a long way reached the point that had been reached in Russia some
fifteen years earlier. This is the situation that accounts for various declarations
about perfect Party-unity applauded by the delegates in Peking.
How does one reconcile the fact that this unity has been so loudly trumpeted
with the fact that delegates were pro- claiming, in the same breath, ‘the inevitable
necessity for many more struggles in the future’? And why, if unity was as solid as
one was made to believe, were the deliberations strictly secret, with only the texts
of the speeches and the new constitution published, together with a meaningless
official postscript?
The implied contradiction is nothing but a paradox. The appearance of unity
stands out because Party and management are equally strong. Hampered by the
peasantry, they don’t face each other in the same way as they did in Russia. This is
why the Cultural Revolution remained unfinished. Behind the scenes, managerial
tendencies (the forces that led to the development of the new class) are still at
work. Sooner or later the equilibrium will be upset. The Party’s new constitution
stressed classic Leninist ‘democratic centralism’ as the basic organisational
principle, while at the same time adding that it would be ‘absolutely impermissible
to suppress criticism and to retaliate’ and that, on the contrary, ‘the Party should
encourage other views and great debates’. This was an attempt to delay the clash
for as long as possible.
Nevertheless the officials are well aware that such a postponement cannot be
permanent. ‘The downfall of the anti-Party group’ Chou En-lai told the delegates,
‘doesn’t end the struggle between the two Party lines’. It wasn’t unity that
characterised the Tenth Congress but the sound judgment that the tendencies
representing the new class could not be made to disappear and that the fight
against them would decide the Party’s future. To put it in Mao’s words:’within a
number of years another revolution will probably have to be carried out. Demons
and devils will break the surface’. Since then, history has borne out that if one
talks of the devil he is sure to come.
Before concerning ourselves with the devil, let us talk of the demons. Just as
Molotov in Russia, the ghost of Lin Piao was hammered with the charge of
defending an ‘anti-Party line’. What strikes one is the formal resemblance of the
indictments. True enough, the Chinese at their Congress were speaking Party-
Russian just as the Russians had been speaking Party-Chinese. This doesn’t
automatically imply that words in Party Chinese have the same meaning as in
Party-Russian.
In Russia the ‘anti-Party group’ defended the (old) Party. It was therefore attacked
by the new class. In China the new class was attacked by the reformed Party that
sought new strength through its self-reform. Did Lin Piao resist? If so, his position
would have been the opposite to that of Molotov. Instead of defending the Party
against the management as Molotov had done, Lin Piao would have stood at the
side of the new class. He would have stood at the side of Liu Shao-chi, who was
his bitter enemy in the Cultural Revolution. Though their names were linked at
the last Congress, such a conclusion isn’t strengthened by Lin Piao’s speeches.
8
None of them contain the least indication to such a change of front.
At most, it might be remembered that it was Lin Piao who jammed the brakes on
the Red Guards when the Cultural Revolution threatened to plunge the country
into economic disaster. But he did so with the full agreement of Mao himself, and
of the Party. Could it be that Lin Piao didn’t agree with this moderate policy? If so
that might explain why the Party first accused him of ‘left extremism’. It doesn’t
explain however why such a reproach was only heard three years later.
Or was Lin Piao really as moderate as he showed himself to be? Hadn’t he been
on the Party’s left long before the Cultural Revolution, whose fruits didn’t prove to
be as red as many people had expected? What supports this view is the position
of his alleged number one accomplice, Chen Po-ta, another head of the Cultural
Revolution draft and a faithful transmitter of Mao-thought at every moment of his
life. There are good reasons for the view that Lin Piao was a tempered radical and
that this led him to being seen as on the left when the Party, withdrawing from
the Cultural Revolution line, veered to the right. After Lin Piao’s death, his position
seemed to be on the right because the pendulum had oscillated and because the
Party, in reaction to another new class danger, had undergone a radicalisation.
Against this view one might quote Lin Piao’s more or less ‘managerial’ position
concerning production. But this is rather uncertain as Chou En-lai’s reproaches
on this point were directed rather against Liu Shoa-chi, with whom Lin Piao was
linked only by means of a political manoeuvre. In favour of this view, on the other
hand, are Chou’s own words, that the so-called anti-Party line ‘had been and still
was one of the two lines inside the Party’. Be this as it may, the Party’s radicalisation
was obvious. The appointment to its leadership of Wang Hung-wen, who had had
to be called to order because he had gone ‘too far’ during the Cultural Revolution,
was therefore symptomatic. But let nobody think that the radicalisation in question
has anything to do with the working-class struggle against capitalism. At the Tenth
Congress no word was spoken either about the exercise of power by the workers
themselves or about the abolition of the wages system, or of a society based on
production. Chou En-lai commented with satisfaction about ‘the stability of prices
and the market’s prosperous position’. His statement was characteristic both in
its lack of any working-class analysis and because of what it revealed concerning
the true nature of Chinese economic and social relations.
These basic economic and social relations are evidently not at stake. Consequently
the real issue is not the choice between a proletarian or a bourgeois alternative.
Everything depends on whether the transformed (or even more transformed) Party
or whether management will rule the roost. That is what lies behind the Party’s
radicalisation, whatever Chou may have been saying about ‘a conflict between
proletarian and bourgeois interests, in which one would have to distinguish false
communists from sincere ones’. Speaking thus, Chou was just churning out Party-
jargon, whose deceptive appearance masked real differences. When the process
of radicalisation had started, where did the traditional and outstanding leaders
like Mao and Chou really stand? At the Congress the latter never tired of quoting
Mao and of stressing his hostility to Lin or Liu. But that doesn’t necessarily argue
his real position ** (**Chou told the delegates, that the official’Report to the Ninth
National Congress’, delivered by Lin Piao, had actually been written by Mao; that
Lin himself, in collaboration with Chen Po-ta, had drafted another document (that
had been cancelled); and that Lin didn’t agree with the text he was delivering.
Whatever the truth of this story may be (and whatever it may not be) it remains
that what could be true for Lin, might also be true for Chou.) What exactly Chou
represents is unclear. This is partly due to the fact that, since some time before
the Tenth Congress, everything in China’s social and political life has again been
on the move. Firm positions will become visible as time goes by. That applies to
everyone on the Chinese scene.
Concerning Mao for instance, Chou informed the delegates that after the Ninth
Congress the Chairman had given several warnings to Lin Piao, all of them in
vain, seeking to ‘save’ him. Does this mean that Mao Tse-tung, Lin Piao and Chen
Po-ta hadn’t such fundamental differences after all? Was it only.at a later date
that the rift widened? In that case, it isn’t only the official statement about Lin
Piao that stands contradicted. It is also suggested that Mao wasn’t heading the
radicalisation but merely tail-ending it.
between the anti-Confucius campaign and the issues of the Cultural Revolution.
‘Confucius’, we are told by Philosopher Yang, ‘reserved absolute wisdom for
the monarch. The reformers of his time however wanted freedom of thought on
behalf of a hundred philosophical schools, with different and opposite opinions.’
Confucius ‘promised his monarch all the land. The reformers on the contrary
were fighting for private landed property and for individual farming’.

How, in connection with all this, should one seek to under- stand the three attempts
on Mao’s life, in which Lin Piao is said to have been closely involved as the main
conspirator? Were these attempts made because the Chairman tended to an
even more managerial point of view? Or were they made because Mao firmly
refused to adopt such a position? Listening to the Party-jargon, looking at the
Chinese smoke-screen, happenings remain obscure. Nevertheless, conclusions
can be drawn that go far beyond the commonplace fixations about a ‘power
battle’. Such descriptions don’t tell us anything of the social forces that drive the
actors to appear before the footlights. It is far more important to understand this
fact than to know who is who. From the historical point of view it doesn’t matter so
much whether this one or that one represents the Party or the management. The
actors are of secondary interest. The play: that’s the point. The battle for power is
not important. What are important are the economic and social frameworks that
determine its limits and by which it is characterised. It is for this reason that we
have placed in the centre of our analysis the struggle between the new class and
the Party bureaucracy, quite apart from actual questions of policy. The correctness
of this method is confirmed when we examine the anti-Confucius campaign, a
campaign that reached its full development after the Tenth Congress.
The campaign was launched on August 7 1973 by an article in the Peking Peoples
Paper. The author was Yang Chung-kuo, deccan of the Philosophy Faculty of
the Canton Sun Yat-sen University (and since referred to as the No. 1 theorist
of anti- Confucianism). The campaign did not start as a pure philosophical
discussion. Philosopher Yang said, ‘the battle of words with Confucius has a very
actual meaning. To criticise his reactionary thoughts can be useful whenever one
participates in present-day class struggle ...’ What sort of class struggle could
Yang be referring to? Neither in his article nor in the debate that followed was
the subject touched upon. Nowhere was it treated from the point of view that
human thought is connected with society, and therefore is right as long as the
society exists that gave birth to it, becoming incorrect to the extent that a given
society is lost in its successor. Such a treatment, linked with the con- viction of the
oppressed that neither society nor thought are invariable and eternal, doesn’t suit
any ruling class. Ruling classes never have an eye for the relativity of their own
mastery. From the mere fact that things were not put in this way one can draw
some plausible conclusions.
The themes hardly need further explanation. Yang, whose origin was the non-
Bolshevik Democratic League of China (which had once taken an intermediate
position between the Communist Party and the Kuo Min-tang) seems to be a
clear voice of the new class. When he speaks of a less important philosopher,
dispatched at Confucius’ command, one might believe that he is not only pointing
at Lin Piao’s murder plot against Mao but that-from an opposite position-he is also
referring to the rumour that Lin didn’t die in a plane crash but was done away
with by Chou En-lai. If Yang condemns Confucius for calling back ‘those who
were already buried in oblivion, aiming to restore the old order’, that too seems
to concern Chou. Chou, after all, was the man who for many years had been the
architect of the new class policy. Moreover, he had his own responsibility for the
rehabilitation of those who had been sacrificed in the Cultural Revolution.
Yang can thus be interpreted in different ways, possibly because his
philosophical contribution to an actual struggle suffers from the contradictions
of the struggle itself. Another possibility is that these contradictions are either the
pure consequence of the special Party-philosophical jargon, or that they have
been created deliberately, for reasons of safety in turbulent times. For times are
turbulent in China. Quoting Confucius, bureaucrats and managers march against
each other. The devil that looms up is a second Cultural Revolution, as predicted
by Chairman Mao. Whose future is at stake? That of Chou or that of Mao? Time
will tell. Nonetheless, one thing seems certain: the outcome of the struggle will
not in the least change the (state) capitalist nature of Chinese society. The rule
of the Party-bureaucracy or managerial rule? That is the question for the years to
come. Whatever the answer, in the long run the new class seems to have the best
testimonials. On to the Thesis on the Chinese revolution

Confucius wasn’t interpreted as a child of his time, who reflected the social
relations and contradictions of the Chou dynasty in Chinese antiquity. His ideas
were considered apart from their soil. They were described as intrinsically
reaction- ary. No attempt was made to understand Confucius from within Chinese
society. On the contrary, Chinese society was explained by stressing Confucius’
influence. This method naturally led to the substitution of social comprehension
by moral judgement.

Consequently the anti-Confucius campaign wasn’t a philosophical attack on

the essential roots of class power. That remains unchallenged. The discussions
became moral condemnations of certain politicians on behalf of others. For this
purpose, Confucius, who had died 2000 years previously, was raised from his
grave and criticised. Whether all this was really being aimed at the dead Lin Piao,
or at his living competitors, is less clear. But once again this is of secondary
significance.

For our purpose, it is more important to realise that there is a direct connection
9
 A Contribution to the Critique
of Political Autonomy
by Gilles Dauve
In a text written for a “Vår Makt” seminar - held in Malmö, Sweden on 1-2 November 2008 - Dauve
surveys the various theories of democracy and their limits.
It’s very difficult to force into obedience whoever
has no wish to command.
J.-J. Rousseau
No critique beyond this point
Any critique of democracy arouses suspicion, and even more so if this critique
is made by those who wish a world without capital and wage-labour, without
classes, without a State.
Public opinion dislikes but understands those who despise democracy from
a reactionary or elitist point of view. Someone who denies the common man’s
or woman’s ability to organize and run himself or herself, logically will oppose
democracy. But someone who firmly believes in this ability, and yet regards
democracy as unfit for human emancipation, is doomed to the dustbins of
theory. At the best, he is looked down upon as an idiot; at the worst, he gets
the reputation of a warped mind who’ll end up in the poor company of the arch-
enemies of democracy: the fascists.
Indeed, if “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the
working classes themselves”, it seems obvious that in order to emancipate
themselves, the exploited must not only do away with the power structures that
enslave them, but also create their own organs of debating and decision-making.
Exercising one’s collective freedom, isn’t that what democracy is all about ? That
assumption has the merit of simplicity: to change the world and live the best
possible human life, what better way than to base this life on institutions that will
provide the largest number of people with the largest freedom on speech and
decision-taking ? Besides, whenever they fight, the dominated masses generally
declare their will to establish the authentic democracy that’s been so far lacking.
For all these reasons, the critique of democracy is a lost or forgotten battle.
Set the controls for the heart of the matter
Democracy claims to be the most difficult objective to achieve, and also the most
vital, the ideal that all human beings desire : the theory and practice of collective
freedom. Democracy is equated with organizing social life by common decisions
which take into account everybody’s needs and desires as much as can be.
But that ideal also claims that to be more than just an ideal, this process of
common decision-making should happen in conditions of equality between us
all. Mere political equality gives each citizen rights but not effective powers: real
democracy implies socio-economic equality, with no more rich and poor, no more
master and servant, no more boss and employee. So a fair total reorganization
and sharing of riches will enable each of us to get a fair share in decision-making
on big issues as well as on minor ones. We’ll have a democracy that’s not just
formal, but real.
10
This is where we bump into a logical flaw.
Sharing is a basic and elementary necessary human attitude, but no-one seriously
expects it to solve the social question. At best, it can alleviate it. No moralist or
prophet has ever convinced the rich and the mighty to divide their wealth and
power fairly between all human beings. We’re entitled to ask where this social
(and not just political) “fairness” is going to come from ? Democracy can’t achieve
it on its own. This so-called “real” democracy lacks reality.
Democracy is a contradiction: it pretends to give and guarantee something
essential which inevitably evades it.
Still, while most people go on at length about the failings of democracy, very few
are willing to discuss its nature, because it appears as the best framework for
human emancipation, and the only way to get it. Any resistance to exploitation,
and any endeavour to create a world without exploitation, is faced with the hard
fact of the exploiters’ control over the exploited. The endless struggle against
factory despotism, against boss rule on the shop floor and outside the factory,
and also the struggle for rank and file control over a strike, go beyond the mere
refusal to depend upon a boss, a local politician, or even a union or party leader.
That negative has a positive dimension. It’s the first step to direct, non-competitive,
solidarity relations, which entail new ways of meeting, discussing and making
decisions. No social movement, big or small, can evade the issue: Who rules ?
Otherwise, without procedures and structures different from top-down ones, the
“lower classes” will eternally be treated as inferior. Be they called a commune, a
committee, a collective, a soviet, a council, or a simple general meeting, every
participant in these bodies realizes his individual freedom as well as his collective
existence. Liberty and fraternity are lived through acts.
Now, do these forms create the movement or just express and structure it ?
It’s no use disclaiming our question on the grounds that these forms do both…
…because the nature of democracy is to treat the space-time of debate and
decision, not as what it is, a component of social life (and therefore of all positive
change), but as the prime condition of social life (and therefore of all positive
change). That’s what we’ll be discussing
On the way, we’ll also have to show how this blinding light is even more attractively
deceptive because the word “democracy” itself is confused and confusing.
But first, a little historical meandering, to see what critique is not ours.
The traditionalist or reactionary critique
In spite of their differences, the opponents of the French Revolution like Burke,
late monarchists like Ch. Maurras, or the German thinkers of the Conservative
Revolution in the 20th century, shared a common distaste for the Rights of Man,
because they all dismiss the notion of the universality of the human species. “In
my life, I’ve seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; as for Man, I must confess
I’ve never met him (..)” (J. de Maistre, 1796) They prefer the supposedly real
abstraction of the soil, the nation, the people, the Volk, the natives, etc., to the
more obviously abstract abstraction of the modern voting citizen. To them, human
beings can only be “brothers” and “sisters” if they belong to a certain group
or origin. That group can even be (German) labour in E. Junger’s The Worker
(1932), but it’s still limited. Communism, on the contrary, is the possibility of the
universal.
Our critique addresses the State, democratic or dictatorial. Reactionary critique
addresses the democratic State. Fascism has a deep hatred of democracy
and, if it comes to power, it does away with political competition, but what he
hates about the democratic system is parliamentary procedures, not the State
institutions which fascists seduce, conquer, occupy and fortify, thereby taking to
their extreme potentials which exist in all parliamentary regimes.
Communism opposes democracy because it is anti-State. Fascism only opposes
democracy, because it is pro-State. We take on democracy as a form of the State,
whereas reactionaries take it on as a political form they consider too feeble to
defend the State. Mussolini and Hitler destroyed parliamentarianism in order
to create an almighty central executive and administrative power. Communists
have had to deal with parliamentarianism as one of the forms (and not a feeble
one) of government and repression. Reaction denounces free will and bourgeois
individualism to replace them with (old or new) forms of oppressive authority.
They want less than individuals. The communist perspective aims to realize the
individual’s aspirations to a freedom that is both personal and lived with others. It
wants more than the individual.
Nietzsche’s critique
In the eyes of Nietzsche, a society of masters ruling over slaves has been
succeeded by the society of the average man, the man of the masses, where
only slaves are to be found. Zarathustra’s author stood for a new aristocracy, no
longer based on birth, nor on money, nor (as the Nazi interpretation would have
it) on power, even less on race, but on the free /mind/spirit/ who’s not afraid of
solitude. It’s because he would like every one of us to rise above himself and
above the “herd” that Nietzsche is hostile to socialism (he sees any collectivism
as another type of gregariousness), and to anarchism (an “autonomous herd”, as
he calls it in Beyond Good & Evil).
For what concerns us here, the flaw in Nietzsche’s vision does not lie in his elitism,
which is undeniable (in that respect, the Third Reich did not distort his writings
too much). More basically, a solution which is neither historical nor political, but
mythical and poetic, can only have meaning and value as an artist’s morals.
Nietzschean politics can’t be recuperated because it does not exist. He was not
dealing with the social question. His ethics is only to be lived by the individual, at
the risk of losing one’s mind, as happened to the philosopher himself.
The individualist critique
The democratic system is often blamed for crushing the individual under the
collective. The poet and dandy Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) wrote: “Nothing
11
more ridiculous than looking for truth in numbers (..) the ballot box is only the way
to create a police force.” And in the 20th century, Karl Kraus: “Democracy is the
right for everyone to be the slave of all.”
Whatever element of truth this point of view may contain, the partisans of
democracy have their answer ready. They do not deny the pressure of democracy
over the individual. They say the democratic system gives everyone a larger
scope for freedom than he would get if his individuality was locked within itself, or
if it had to go into an unpredictable congregation of individual atoms.
Some individualists are more social than others. They suggest an association of
freely consenting individuals. This is precisely one of the variant of the democratic
contract, perhaps one of the most progressive.
Ignoring democracy
Before 1848, large sectors of socialism did not expect anything from democracy,
because they stood outside politics. In spite of their quarrels, these schools
of thought agreed on the generalization of associations, as a remedy to the
“dissociation” (P. Leroux) brought about by the triumph of industry and money.
All that was needed was to combine passions (Fourier), creative minds and
productive abilities (Saint-Simon), or mutual bonds (Proudhon). Unlike the neo-
babouvists who’d inherited Babeuf’s experience and advocated the seizure of
political power by organized mass violence, all the above mentioned thinkers
believed in the supremacy of morals: a new world would be born less out of
necessity than by an ethical impetus. Some even hoped that socialism could
be founded (funded, actually) by generous enlightened bourgeois, on a small
scale at first, and then develop as the bulk of society would follow its example,
political power having little or nothing to do about it: therefore there was no need
for revolution.
This is neither a critique of politics nor of democracy.
The communist perspective is anti-political, not a-political.
The Revolutionary Syndicalist critique : circumventing democracy
Though it may seem to have only a historical interest, this critique is still active
today, in a different way from 1910 of course. The idea to absorb politics into
the economy, i.e. to have a directly social democracy, is surfacing again in the
current utopia of a seizure of local power so generalized that it would take away
the substance of central political power (the State), and thus relieve us from the
necessity of destroying the State. In Changing the World Without Taking Power
(2002), J. Holloway argues that radical transformation is now so embedded in our
daily lives that we’re gradually transforming the fabric of society, without the need
for a potentially dictatorial break. Evolution instead of revolution, what else ? The
“slow revolutions” notion, recently theorized by A. Bartra, partly inspired by the
situation in Mexico and taken up by some radicals, amounts to no revolution.
In the mid-19th century, too, instead of addressing democracy, some hoped to
go round it.
Proudhon believed that work gave the toiling masses a political capacity : let’s
find a new way of producing goods, let’s make the bourgeois useless, the
rest will follow, and the workshop will replace government. Democracy was
neither accepted nor fought against, but directly realized by work, without any
mediation.
About fifty years later, revolutionary syndicalism had a loathing for parliamentary
democracy. The vehicle for change was to come from labour organized in
industrial (as opposed to trade) unions, which would unite the whole class, skilled
and unskilled. Proudhon had been the ideologue of craftsmen and small industry.
Anarcho-syndicalism was adapted to the age of trusts and huge factories, but the
principle was similar: a fusion between industry and government. After acting as
an egalitarian body fighting the bosses and police, the union would later manage
the economy during and after the revolution. Some syndicalists, like De Leon in
the US, wanted parallel political and industrial action, but to them politics was
clearly outside and against parliament.
Revolutionary syndicalism has been reproached for its elitism. It’s true it
emphasized the role of active minorities that would /spur/push/ the less
advanced into action. But most revolutionary syndicalists aimed at an active class
conscious mass elite, utterly different from what they saw as the passive mass of
sheeplike social-democrat voters. Georges Sorel (1847-1922) thought that the
labour union, unlike parliament and party life, bred “a fair and real organized
equality”, as all members were wage-labourers and in solidarity with each other.
The “new political principle of the proletariat” is the “government by vocational
groups” self-organized in the work place. “Resistance bodies will finally enlarge
their scope and range so much that they will absorb nearly all politics” in a
successful “struggle to suck bourgeois political organization dry of all life”.
On one essential point, Sorel had a point : “ Marx believed that the democratic
regime has the advantage that as workers are no longer attracted to fighting
the monarchy or the aristocracy, the notion of class becomes easier to grasp.
Experience teaches us the opposite; democracy is quite good at preventing the
advance of socialism, by diverting workers’ minds toward trade-unionism under
government protection.” (1908)
Sorel, however, only scored a negative point against Marx, because experience
was also teaching the opposite of what he was expecting: the union failed as
well as the party, and union self-organization was often sucked dry of all life by
bourgeois democracy.
“You can’t destroy a society by using the organs which are there to preserve it (..)
any class who wants to liberate itself must create its own organ”, H. Lagardelle
wrote in 1908, without realizing that his critique could be applied as much to
the unions (including a supposed revolutionary syndicalist French CGT on a fast
road to bureaucratization and class collaboration) as to the parties of the Second
International. Revolutionary syndicalism discarded the voter and preferred the
producer: it forgot that bourgeois society creates and lives off both. Communism
will go beyond both.
Anti-parliamentarianism
Understanding universal suffrage as the act by which that the workers swap their
potential violence for a voting paper, is part of the essentials of social critique.
Attacking elections has been a constant theme for the anarchists, and was not
uncommon among socialists before 1914. All left factions and parties in the
Second International agreed that any parliament remains under the control of
the ruling class, and election day is always a set back for radicalism. After 1917,
this remained a fundamental tenet of all varieties of communists. Even those who
advocated tactical use of elections regarded the soviets, and not the Parliament,
as the political basis and organ of a future revolution.
That being said, and it must be said, rejecting parliament does not sum up nor
define our perspective, no more than despising the rich or hating money. Mussolini
also wanted to bring down old bourgeois institutions, and he succeeded, up to
a point.
12
The Bolshevik critique : dictatorship versus democracy
In 1920, against Kautsky’s Terrorism & Communism published a year before,
Trotsky wrote a book with the same title. Kautsky opposed democracy and mass
freedom to civil war and systematic use of violence. Trotsky distinguishes between
democracy as universal suffrage, and democracy as the mass of the people itself
: to understand what is meant by “people”, one has to go into a class analysis.
Before parliamentarianism as we’ve known it since the end of the 19th century,
Trotsky explains, there were examples of early conservative democracy: the
agrarian democracy of the farmers in the New England town meeting, the Swiss
self-government of the urban lower middle classes and the rich peasantry (praised
by Rousseau in The Social Contract, 1762). Then, as capital and labour became
“the polar classes of society”, bourgeois democracy developed as “the weapon
of defence” against class antagonisms. Trotsky reminds the reader what Western
civilized democracy has led to : a world war.
As for Russia, Trotsky justifies terror and coercion methods on the grounds that
they’re the only methods available if the proletariat is to defend itself against a
far more terrorist and bloodthirsty counter-revolution. “When the civil war is over
(..) (B)y means of a systematically applied labour service, and a centralized
organization of distribution, the whole population of the country will be drawn into
the general system of economic arrangement and self-government.”
Knowing that Trotsky was at the same time advocating forced militarization of
labour, one can only read those lines as statesman talk justifying his own power
over the common people. For what concerns us here, Trotsky only targets
democracy because of what it’s become under capitalism: an “imperialist
democracy”. So, “(..) we repudiate democracy in the name of the concentrated
power of the proletariat”. He is interested in the forms taken by democracy (and
claims Bolshevism will later achieve a superior form), not in the democratic
principle.
The anarchist critique : dispersing power
Leninism is haunted by the seizure of power, anarchism by its obsessive fear.
As a reply to authority and dictatorship, anarchism stands for the collective
versus leadership, bottom v. up, horizontal v. vertical, commune v. government,
decentralization v. centralization, self-management v. top management, local
community v. mass electorate: a plurality of true democracies instead of a false
one, and ultimately the State will be destroyed by universalized democracy. Lots
of small scale production and living units will be dynamic enough to get together
without any of them alienating its autonomy. Like the polis of Ancient times, the
modern metropolis falls prey to oligarchic tendencies: myriads of federated co-
ops, collectives and districts will be able to run themselves, and thus remain
democratic. If power is split between millions of elements, it becomes harmless.
We won’t solve the problem of power by spreading little bits of it everywhere.
Bordiga’s critique: the opposite of democracy
Amedeo Bordiga is one of the very few who took democracy seriously: he didn’t
look at its methods, but at its principle. However, he likened so much proletarian
democracy to bourgeois democracy that he ended up missing the principle
itself.
His starting point is that democracy consists in individuals regarding themselves
as equals, each making his own opinion according to his free will, then
comparing it with the opinion of others, before taking a decision (usually after
a vote and according to majority rule: this is important, yet not essential to the
definition). Parliament stifles the proletarians by forcing them into a political
partnership with the bourgeois. Nothing original in that last statement, but the
deduction that follows is not so common : Bordiga thinks worker democracy is
also to be rejected, because it decomposes the proletarian fighting spirit into
individual decisions. Democracy means a reunion of equal rights and wills, which
is impossible in bourgeois parliamentarianism, and pointless in proletarian class
activity: revolution does not depend on a mass of individual decisions getting
together, nor on majority or proportional procedures, but on the ability of the
organized proletariat to act as a centralizing body and a collective mind. (Bordiga
calls it “a party”, but his party is very different from the Leninist one, since it is
not based on socialist intellectuals introducing socialism into the working class
from outside. To make things more complicated, Bordiga never openly criticized
Lenin’s conception of the party.)
“(..) the principle of democracy has no intrinsic value. It is not a “principle”, but
rather a simple mechanism of organization (..) revolution is not a problem of forms
of organization. On the contrary, revolution is a problem of content, a problem of
the movement and action of revolutionary forces in an unending process (..)” (The
Democratic Principle, January 1922)
Indeed communist revolution is the creation of non-profit, non-mercantile,
co-operative and fraternal social relations, which implies smashing the State
apparatus and doing away with the division between firms, with money as the
universal mediator (and master), and with work as a separate activity. That is the
content.
What Bordiga fails to see, is that this content won’t come out of any kind of form.
Some forms are incompatible with the content. We can’t reason like the end was
the only thing that mattered: the end is made out of means. Certain means get
us closer to the end we want, while others make it more and more remote and
finally destroy its possibility. The content of communism (which Bordiga was
right to emphasize) can only be born out of the self-organized action of “the vast
majority” of the proletariat (Communist Manifesto). The communist movement is
not democratic: neither is it dictatorial, if the dictator is one part of the proletariat
oppressing the rest. Soon enough that part loses whatever proletarian character
it had and turns into a privileged group telling people what to do. This is what
happened in Russia, as some like Otto Rühle understood as early as 1920-21.
Bordiga lacks a critique of politics. He perceives of revolution as a succession of
phases: first it would replace bourgeois power, then it would create new social
relations. This is why he has no trouble believing that the Bolsheviks could have
ruled Russia for years and, even without being able of transforming the country
in a communist way, still promote world revolution. Yet power is not something
revolutionaries can hold on to with no revolution happening in their country or
anywhere else. Like many others, Bordiga equates power to an instrument. When
Jan Appel was staying in Moscow as a KAPD delegate in the Summer 1920, he
was shown factories with well-oiled machines that could not be operated for lack
of spare parts: when the revolution breaks out in Europe, the Russian workers
would tell him, you’ll send us spares and we’ll be able to operate these machines
again. After October 1917, the Bolsheviks must have thought of themselves as
something similar: a machinery still partly idle but preparing for world revolution.
Unfortunately, power (and even more so State power) is not a tool waiting to be
properly handled. It’s a social structure that does not remain on stand-by for long.
It has a function: it connects, it makes people do things, it imposes, it organizes
what exists. If what exists is wage-labour and commodity exchange, even in the
original and makeshift existence it had in Russia in 1920, power will manage
that kind of labour and that kind of exchange. Lenin died a head of State. On the
contrary, a revolutionary structure is only defined by its acts, and if it does not act
it soon withers.
13
Like Trotsky, Bordiga theorizes the necessity to do violence to particular
proletarians in the name of the future interests of the proletarians in general: as
late as 1960, he would still justify the Bolshevik repression of the Kronstadt rising
in February-March, 1921. He never understood that at the time he was writing The
Democratic Principle, the Russian experience that he extensively used to back
up his thesis was eliminating whatever revolution was left in Russia. Bordiga was
attacking democratic formalism on behalf of a revolution that was already more
formal than real.
Dictatorship is the opposite of democracy. The opposite of democracy is not a
critique of democracy.
Council communism : the quest for non-violence
The “German” Communist Left agreed with the “Italian” Left on the rejection of
bourgeois democracy. The disagreement focused on worker democracy.
What has come to be known as “council communism” was one of the earliest
critics of the failure of Bolshevism, and remains one of the best. But as time
passed, council communists have tended to be wary about anything that might
be a constraint upon the working class. Their critique of bureaucracy as the
main obstacle to revolution led them to democracy. Not bourgeois democracy,
needless to say, worker democracy, but in that respect both bourgeois and
worker forms proclaim the same purpose: to prevent or limit encroachments on
personal freedom.
We won’t reply (as Bordiga would) that individual freedom is an illusion and is
irrelevant to communism. We only say that in any case such freedom can’t be
guaranteed by the democratic principle.
What this quest for non-pressure boils down to is the desire to avoid the ill
effects of conflicts. As it happens, the “protection” provided for by democracy
only works in the absence of any serious crisis among the persons concerned,
be they proletarians instead of bourgeois. As soon as debate is not enough to
result into a decision willingly accepted by the group as a whole, the group can’t
carry on as a mere confrontation of free wills (unless it’s only a friendly debating
society). Either the group thinks that maintaining the community matters more
than the disagreement. Or it splits. Or it forces a decision unto the participants. In
all cases, the democratic principle has been suspended.
The ultimate result of turning free will into an absolute would be for a radical
group to do nothing but circulate data and information : no theory, except the
theory of exchange, the theory of the necessity of autonomy. No theory, except
the theory that no theory must be imposed onto the working class. Such a non-
theory would of course be inaccessible to criticism, which would help the group
developing its own informal bureaucracy.
Bordiga’s theory of the party denies the problem. Councilism evades it by waiting
for such an overwhelming proletarian majority that all conflict will be resolved
without any verbal or physical violence. The “party or autonomy” alternative was
born out of our past failures. A future revolutionary movement will have to go
beyond that alternative.
The critique of “formal” democracy
Traditional Marxist analysis has the merit /of stressing/to stress/ that democracy
gives possibilities that only become realities for those able to use them: in a class
society, the members of the ruling class will always be in a much better position
to do so. Everyone is (nearly) free to publish a paper, but the ads necessary to
finance a daily or a magazine won’t go to an anti-capitalist press. The ballot paper
of Henry Ford is counted as one vote like the ballot paper of one of his workers,
but Mr Ford will hold more sway on public affairs than any of his workers, or even
of thousands of them.
Like some previous critiques, this one points to an essential feature of democracy,
but its shortcoming is to treat democratic forms as if they lacked reality, whereas
they are real, with a reality of their own.
It’s often said that the liberties allowed by a democratic regime are only cosmetic:
that is true, but only part of the truth. Everybody knows that freedom of speech
favours the business lawyer more than his cleaning lady. In an unequal society,
knowledge, culture, politics and access to the public scene are also unequal. Yet,
today as yesterday, by using and enlarging possibilities left to them, the workers,
the common people have been able to better their lot, and thus they’ve given
some content to liberties that aren’t just empty shells. True, this betterment was
caused more by direct often violent action than by democracy properly speaking:
nevertheless, legal unions, litigation bodies, as well as local authorities, members
of parliament or even governments favourable to labour have helped channel
these demands, moderating them and pushing them forward at the same time.
Democracy and reformism have led a couple’s life for nearly 150 years now,
although they’ve often been strange bedfellows.
Explaining that a worker’s ballot paper only formally weigh the same as his boss’s,
only proves that so-called political equality does not make for social inequality. Yet
reformists have never said the opposite. They say: “Since Mr Ford’s ballot paper
weighs a million times more than one of his workers’, let’s get together the votes
of millions of workers and we’ll be stronger than the Ford family. We’ll turn into
reality the appearance of power that the bourgeois have granted us.” Against the
might of capital, labour has the strength of numbers: speaking in public, having
papers independent from the bosses’ press, organizing in the workplace, meeting
and demonstrating in the street, are after all easier in democracy, as the exploited
and oppressed have experienced. In general, the mass of the population has
more ways to improve its conditions of work and life with Adenauer than Hitler,
with De Gaulle than Pétain, with Allende than Pinochet, with Felipe Gonzales than
Franco, etc.
If parliament was only a sham, and freedom of speech only a deception, there
wouldn’t be any more parliaments, parties or political campaigns, and they
wouldn’t still rally voters, and even stir passions. (Unless we think this is due to
continuous crafty bourgeois conditioning: but surely over a century of democratic
regime should have acted as an eye opener...) Democracy is not a show,- not just
a show.
So Churchill was right ?...
This brief survey seems to leave us with only one option, summed up by W.
Churchill in the House of Commons on November 11, 1947: “Democracy is the
worst form of government – except for all other forms, that have been tried from
time to time.”
It’s significant that the best known definition of democracy should be based on
a paradox, even a play on words. In fact, everybody makes fun of Churchill’s
phrase, and yet everybody accepts it, with one reservation: everybody thinks he
has the solution to really get the best out of this lesser evil.
(It’s also significant that the famous British statesman should have added cynicism
to pragmatism in another phrase: “The best argument against democracy is a five-
minute conversation with the average voter.” This second sentence is less often
quoted: the scorn it displays for the actors – extras would be more appropriate
– of democracy might discredit the first definition.)
14
Let’s go back to the word itself.
Westminster is not on the Acropolis
If we put back in its place, i.e. in history, this reality commonly called democracy,
we realize how poorly the word is adapted to what it has labelled for a couple of
centuries.
Modern times have given an utterly new usage to a notion born in Ancient Greece.
Nowadays, the man in the street, the academic or the political activist, everyone
uses the word democracy for 5th century B.C. Athens and 21st century Italy or
Sweden. The people who would never dare talk about a prehistoric “economy”
or “work” among New Guinea tribesmen see no anachronism in applying the
same term to a system where citizenship meant an ability (theoretical but also
partly effective) to govern and be governed, and to a system where, for 99% of the
citizens, citizenship comes down to the right to be represented.
This gap was more readily admitted in the early days. James Madison, one of the
founding fathers of the US Constitution, differentiated between democracy, where
“the people meet and exercise their government in person”, and republic (a term
of Roman and not Greek origin), where “they assemble and administer it by their
representatives and agents”. With the passing of time and the rise of the modern
bureaucratic State (which Madison opposed), democracy has become a mere
synonym for power vested in the people.
Common wisdom bemoans the limits of a Greek democracy closed to women,
slaves and foreigners, and rejoices over the openness of modern democracy to
larger and larger sections of the population. The ideal of radical democrats is
a demos that would welcome all human beings living on a given territory. They
forget that the Ancient Athenian fortunate enough to enjoy citizenship was not
a citizen because he was a human being, but because he happened to be a
co-owner of the polis : he was a landowner, small or big. The democratic system
emerged as a way to manage as smoothly as possible the contradictions within
a community of male family heads, inexorably divided by a growing unequal
distribution of fortune.
It’s only because it was limited to a group that shared something vital (a superior
social position, albeit undermined by money differences) that Greek democracy
could afford to be participatory (which did not save it from periodic crises). In
Europe or the US today, nothing can be compared to the demos of Pericles’ time.
When it’s applied to societies ruled by the capital-labour relationship, the word
“democracy” tells us more about what these societies think of themselves than
about their reality.
A question of words ?
If we wish to stick to the word communism and object to democracy, it’s not for
tradition’s sake, but for historical motives. In spite of its imperfections, communism
expresses the endeavour of the exploited and of the human species to liberate
itself. The word and the notion were meaningful (that is, debatable and debated)
in 1850 or 1900. The revolution that failed in Russia, and Stalinism later, loaded
the term with a totally different meaning. As the S.I. once explained, captive
words become like prisoners put to hard labour: they too are forced to work for
the benefit of those who’ve captured them. Communism is not bureaucratic by
nature.
On the contrary, democracy has been a distorted word ever since its return in
the mouth of bourgeois revolutionaries from the 18th century onwards, and of
most (but not all) socialists in the 19th and 20th centuries. The distortion does
not consist in an outright lie like the Maoist descriptions of life in China, but in
a mental displacement of reality: as it identifies modern parliaments to Ancient
agoras, and the 21st century citizen to a 5th century B.C. Athenian citizen, and
as it suggests the modern one has a lot more power, it compresses history and
confuses us.
Exploitation and / or domination ?
Do inequality, poverty and misery exist because a few privileged ones make
decisions for us all ? Or have these happy few got a near monopoly over decisions
because they already are rich and therefore powerful ? The question is sterile.
Mountains of books and articles have been and are still written to refute the
alleged Marxist claim that “the economy” explains next to everything. Who ever
made such a claim ?
“According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining
factor is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx
nor I have ever asserted.” (Engels, letter to J. Bloch, September 21, 1890)
The “economy” surely does not explain power. Profit-making strictly speaking does
not account for (local or world) wars. A similar socio-economic “infrastructure”
can coexist with very different and opposed political forms. Capitalist Germany
was successively run by a monarchist caste, by bourgeois, by the leaders of a
nationalist-racist one-party State, then after 1945 by bourgeois in the West and by
bureaucrats in the East, then again by bourgeois when the country was reunified.
History provides us with many examples of non-coincidence between economic
might and political authority, and of a modern State occasionally ruling against the
bourgeois, forcing the general interest of the system upon reluctant industrialists
or businessmen. Faced with a large strike in the Ruhr, Bismark himself compelled
the bosses to grant a wage rise. Although usually in Europe money brings about
power, in Africa and in the East, power is often the quick way to fortune, with
family or clan misappropriating public funds or siphoning off foreign trade. Also,
it’s not uncommon for political rulers to dispossess the rich, as we’ve seen in
Russia over the last ten or twenty years.
Yet, in the vast majority of cases, political leaders and masters of the land, of
trade and of manufacturing go hand in hand or come down to the same thing.
Commanding men usually goes together with putting them to work. The two
forms of control can clash with one another, but not for long: one consolidates
the other. Power does not create itself. Political rule and possession of the means
of production rarely coincide, but in modern society there’s neither exploitation
without domination, nor domination without exploitation: the same groups have
direct or indirect control over wealth and power.
The exploiter needs to be able to put pressure on the person he exploits: he
only exploits what he has supremacy over. Domination is a precondition and a
necessary form of exploitation. Let’s not try and decide which one logically or
chronologically comes first. Exploitation is never just “economic” (I have someone
work for me, in my place and for my benefit), but also “political” (instead of
someone making decisions about his life, I take the decisions myself, for instance
I decide when to hire and fire him). Society is not divided, as Castoriadis thought
in the 1960s, between order-givers and order-takers. Or rather, this division exists,
but these “orders” have to do with what structures today’s world: the capital-wage
labour relation (which does not mean it determines everything). There is no need
to oppose exploitation to domination. Human societies in general, and capitalism
in particular, can only be understood by the link between exploitation and
domination. Firms are not just profit makers: they are also power structures, but
they remain in business as long as they create and accumulate value, otherwise
they go bankrupt.
15
Politics as the foundation of democracy
If politics means taking into account society as a whole (including the reality of
power), and not just as an addition of local or technical issues, then any social
change is political, any social critique is political, and revolution has to do with
politics.
Politics, however, is something else than this concern for the global, the general,
the total, because it turns this totality into a new specialization, into an activity
removed from direct social interests. That special dimension cannot ignore socio-
economic hierarchies and oppositions. But it deals with them by shifting them
on a level where the roots of these conflicts will never be changed, only their
consequences.
Ancient Greece’s real contribution to history was not the principle of democracy
as a set of rules and institutions by which citizens make collective decisions. The
innovation went deeper. It invented what democracy is based upon: a special
time-space reserved for confrontation, and distinct from the rest of social life.
In that specific sphere, a person is taken away from his private interests, from
fortune and status differences, from his social superiority or inferiority, and placed
on an equal footing with all the other citizens. Equality of rights alongside social
inequality: that is the definition of politics. Society is fully aware of its inability
to suppress group or class antagonism, so it transfers the antagonism onto a
parallel level that’s supposed to be neutral, where conflicts are acknowledged
and softened in the best possible interest of the continuation of the system as a
whole. It’s this separation that Marx’s early writings were dealing with. Direct or
worker people’s democracy maintains the separation while it claims to go beyond
it by involving everyone in the democratic process, as if popular empowerment
could solve the problem of power. Unfortunately, getting everybody inside a
separate sphere does not suppress separation.
Any human group thinks of and reacts to the whole of its situation. But class
societies, in a thousand ways and through trial and error, have divorced debating,
managing and decision-making from the rest. Logically, these societies regard
this dissociation as the “natural” and universally desirable best possible way of
solving human conflicts.
Class divisions, in certain conditions, have created politics: doing away with class
divisions will entail going beyond politics.
Democracy is not to be denounced and smashed, but superseded. Like other
essential critiques, the critique of democracy will only become effective by the
communizing of society.
As long as people content themselves with a “fair” redistribution of wealth, they
inevitably also go for a “fair” redistribution of power. Only an altogether different
world will no longer be obsessed with power, with taking it, sharing it, or scattering
it. We’ll solve the political question when we stop treating it as the prime issue.
Manufacturing consent… and dissent
When writers like N. Chomsky expose the conditioning of public opinion by the
State, media and lobbies, they fail to ask themselves what is being conditioned.
Opinion is thought of as a collective motley and fickle spirit that sometimes
determines events and sometimes is tossed about by them, as if these events
were within its reach one day, and out of reach the next. For instance, German
opinion is reported to have been indifferent or hostile to Hitler in 1923, then to
have listened to him after 1929, before moving away from him for good after the
fall of the Third Reich. It’s like these successive points of view had been taken
regardless of what German individuals, groups, classes, unions, parties, etc.,
were doing each time.
Another example is the day there was a reversal of French opinion in 1968: the
huge rightwing demonstration on the Champs Elysées, May 30, is described as
the death knell for the rebellion in the streets and in the factories. Yet this shows
what public opinion really is. In April, most future rebels had no idea they would
be soon marching in the street or stopping work. A few days later, pushed on
by the early street fighting and the initiative of a minority of workers, millions of
people discovered what they wanted to do and could do. A couple of weeks later,
the ebb of the strike wave (and for many, the satisfaction of seeing their demands
at least partly met) wore out the revolt and enabled conservative forces to get a
grip on themselves. Thus, from beginning to end, the shock of the largest general
strike in history determined the flow of events, and successively made people
aware of possible changes, enabled law and order supporters to resurface, and
created despair among the rebels but also numerous rebounds over the next ten
years.
Men’s “social being determines their consciousness”. Admittedly, it works both
ways, but certainly a lot more this way than the other. After 1945, in France as
elsewhere, the workers at the Billancourt Renault plant near Paris had been
fed with Stalinist slander depicting (real or /invented/imagined/) Trotskysts as
fascists and agents provocateurs in the pay of the boss and the police. The CP-
led union, the CGT, had unrelentingly and usually successfully prevented work
stoppages: “The strike is the weapon of big business…” In the Spring 1947, the
Billancourt workers went on a two-week strike, partly managed by the rank and
file, and elected a well known Trotskyst, Pierre Bois, on the strike committee.
Yet they’d been “conditioned” by years of propaganda, and the tiny revolutionary
minority could only answer back by poorly distributed leaflets, with the risk of
being beaten up or sacked, as the CGT held sway over the running of the plant. If
in such negative circumstances, a substantial number of workers dared lay down
tools and designate a Trotskyst to represent them, it’s not because they would
have had access at last to Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed or other critical analyses
of the bureaucracy. More simply, the pressure of their conditions of work and
life, and their own resistance to exploitation led them to disobey union orders, to
fight alongside persons like P. Bois, and treat as comrades those they distrusted
before. In some ways, there was more militancy on the premises in 1947 than in
1968: in 47, a few strikers debated about manufacturing firearms, and the union
van was turned over by rebellious workers.
By the same logic, when the strike was over, with the CP being expelled from
government and the beginning of the Cold War, the CGT took on a tougher anti-
bourgeois line. One reason (or pretext) for the government getting rid of its CP
ministers was the Stalinists’ getting on the bandwagon and siding with the strikers.
The worker bureaucracy got back its influence over the mass of the workforce.
Not entirely, though: the Trotskysts tried to take advantage of the strike to launch
a small union (called Syndicat Démocratique Renault), which struggled along for
a couple of years before dying away. If very few workers had confidence in it, it’s
not because Stalinist slander would have retrieved the efficiency it had lost in the
Spring 1947. The reason is more down to earth: the CGT was better in tune with
the needs of the proletarians, pressed some of their demands and structured
their struggles. The CGT defended and represented them better than a union
which was a small minority in Renault and had hardly any support in the rest of
the country.
From propagandist to educationist
Opinion is a set of (individual or group) ideas about the world. Representative
democracy wishes each of us to form his ideas on his own, and only afterwards
to compare them to other persons’ ideas. Direct democracy prefers a collective
16
making of ideas. But both think the only way to free thought is to be correctly
educated or even better, self-taught, this self being here again preferably
collective.
Because of the rise and fall of totalitarianism in the 20th century, the word and
the reality of propaganda are now commonly looked down upon. In 1939, S.
Chakotin published The Rape of the Masses (translated into English in 1940; new
edition by Haskell House, 1982): a disciple of Pavlov, he argued that totalitarian
(especially Nazi) methods of mind control were based on the use of emotional
urges to create conditioned reflexes. Chakotin was theorizing his own practice:
he’d been in charge of anti-fascist propaganda for the German SPD in the early
1930s. He said he appealed to reason, not to the senses as the Nazis did, but
that did not prevent him from devising crowd conditioning techniques for mass
meetings. Chakotin’s failure to beat the Nazis at their own game is a sign that
Hitler’s success was only marginally caused by crowd manipulation techniques.
Germany turned to Hitler when the Weimar republic proved incapable of offering
any other (radical, reformist or conservative) solution to its crisis.
Ed. Bernays, perhaps the first professional advertiser on public relations, had
already described in Propaganda (1928) how an “invisible government” ruled
democratic society. He claimed to be able to act on the collective subconscious
with a combination of Freudism and crowd psychology, and invented advertising
techniques that he sold to big business as well as politicians. In 1954, he was
instrumental in destabilizing the (democratic) government of Guatemala that the
US finally toppled. In those days, it was still a novelty to “sell” a candidate to
the White House like a soft drink, and by similar methods. Unpalatable Bernays
was ahead of his time, and heralded ours, when no party dares engage into
propaganda: it communicates. Commercials don’t sell goods, they sell lifestyles.
Parties don’t promote programs, they promote meaning and imagery.
Unlike the simplistic agit-prop of yesteryear, today’s most advanced political
advertising does not pretend to change our views : it presents itself as a helping
hand that will allow us to make up our own opinions. Advertising now calls itself
information, needless to say interactive information. Everything is supposed
to be “bottom up”. Modern management has become the ideal model of all
relations. The “progressive” boss gives the staff a large margin of self-organizing
in their work… as long as they reach the objective set by the company. The
teacher aims at bringing out his student’s autonomy. The psychologist (counsel,
sorry...) repeats to his patient : Be Yourself !The contradiction remains the same
in every field of activity and ends up in more control over staff (particularly
thanks to computerization), more bureaucratic guidelines in schools, and more
counselling.
How could it be otherwise ? The critique of “education first” (or self-education
first) was expressed as early as 1845:
“The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and
upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is
essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide
society between two parts, one of which is superior to society.” (Marx, Theses on
Feuerbach, III)
Nobody believes much of what commercial or political advertising says, yet it
works. No driver watching a Peugeot TV commercial regards the new SW 407 as
the best estate car ever made, and no voter expects the presidential candidate
to keep all his promises, but people buy cars, take part in elections, and that’s
what matters. The content of the message is far less important than popular
participation in and acceptance of the whole system.
“The more information and discussion there is, the better…”

Democrats, moderate or radical, all think that the inadequacies of democracy
come from the fact that there is never enough of it: not enough good schooling,
no enough quality papers, no enough serious talks on TV… and our information
resources are never wide and varied enough.
Democracy is indeed based on (individual and/or collective) free will, but
this freedom must be properly fuelled by the largest possible information and
discussion.
This vision is to be expected from party professional organizers, teachers,
media people, publishers and all those who make a living (and a sense) out
of communication. But it is surprising that so many revolutionaries also should
regard getting and exchanging ideas as the prime mover of history.
In Orwell’s 1984, Winston is watched by a telescreen forcibly installed in his living-
room and which he is forbidden to switch off. In the early 21st century, television
is no longer the main popular screen it was in 1960 or 1990. On the Internet, at
home or on portable cell phones, people have direct access to forums where
thousands of talks take place between a government minister, an ecologist, a
businesswoman, a gay activist, an unemployed, an antiglobalizer, or sometimes
an anarchist. At the click of a mouse, I can get loads of data and differing
views on what’s going on today in Peking or La Paz. A few more clicks, and
I challenge these data and views in the company of an Internaut from Sydney
or Montreal, and have my own views on these events circulated worldwide in a
matter of minutes. This instant and universal availability also applies to the past.
Unless I have a special fondness for the canals in Amsterdam, I no longer visit the
International Institute of Social History to know about the Ruhr Red Army in 1920.
Not everything is available on-line, but there’s more on the Internet now than on
any single public library… or of course newspaper kiosk. Most of all, it’s not just
there to be read, but exchanged and debated.
Since everything is made measurable these days, it’s likely someone will invent a
system that monitors and quantifies all verbal exchange (including conversations
on the web, on phones, etc.) taking place at one particular moment on this planet.
Even taking into account the growth in population, the figure is likely to be higher
than in 1970.
Modern man is a paradox. He keeps repeating he is increasingly being
dispossessed (and he puts the blame on entities he calls the economy, finance
or globalization) and yet, when his workday is over, he feels he is repossessing
his existence by reading about dispossession in the paper, or (better and more
interactive) by chatting about it in cyberspace.
The less power we have over our lives, the more we talk about it. The contemporary
citizen is dissatisfied with heavy and remote traditional democratic mechanisms.
At the same time, he is given a continuous instant democracy made of opinion
polls, webtalk, participatory radio and TV, and tele-reality shows. He’s not just
asked his political preferences every four or five years: every day is now election
day. Mixing Latin and Greek, we could say we now live in a home centred
domocracy which gives us the liberty to change things from our own home : I
help solve environmental world problems by buying energy saving light bulbs for
my living-room.
People used to make fun of Speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park as a symbol of socially
harmless free speech. Today’s generalized self-managed speech is universally
and immediately circulated. In the workplace, in the classroom, in a couple, in
a family, between professions, between performers and spectators, between
cultures, religions, media, among neighbours, everywhere, everything ought to
be discussed and all information to be shared, so that power should constantly
17
flow and never crystallize, so no-one could monopolize it. The 1999 Kosovo war
was the first with mass Internaut involvement. Everyone of us becomes a self-
appointed reporter : Don’t hate the media: Be the media !
To impose us what to think, democracy tells us what we have to think about. When
Habermas extolled the virtues of the “public sphere” in 1962, he also bemoaned
its undermining by commercial mass media. He could be more optimistic today,
when universal debate seems to revive the “openness” he favours : a citizen is
now a person with access to the press, to the media and to the Internet. Yet this
new citizenship amounts to the liberty to voice our views on world affairs, i.e. on
what is currently being said on world affairs by the press, the media and on the
Internet. The public sphere passes off as a reality that can put a check on State
power, but when did it really determine the course of events, or was able to stop
the descent into catastrophes like 1914, Hitler, the second world war, or colonial
and post-colonial massacres ? Giving one’s opinion is as relevant as opinions are
decisive, and they’re not decisive, not much. The liberal conservative Tocqueville
was more to the point :
“(..) it is an axiom of political science in the United States that the only way
to neutralize the impact of newspapers is to multiply them” (Democracy in
America,1835)
Most of all, democracy triumphs by telling us where to think. The 1900 paper
reader could choose to buy a socialist or a rightwing daily, but he had hardly
any influence on the structure and evolution of the press. The organization of the
Internet is equally beyond the reach of a website browser or writer : for a start, he
was never asked about the birth of the web itself. Saying the Internet was created
by (and would not exist without) millions of Internauts, is as true as saying that
millions of drivers are responsible for the development of the car industry. Making
a principle of maximum information and discussion, is inevitably prioritizing the
framework where information circulates and discussion takes place. Of course,
everyone wishes the channels of communication to be as much “bottom up” as
possible, but how could they be if the whole life of the communicators is “top
down” organized ? Society is not the addition of millions of publicly shared
experiences or views.
“The idea of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”: this is as much
true as in 1845. The difference is that billions of ideas are now being circulated
and (nearly) universally available. But who has the power ? The political system
is still tuned to general and presidential elections, and the rest is an accessory to
the rhyme. In 1900 or 1950, politics was talked about but not made in village hall
debates. Neither is it made today on the Internet. Spectacle-induced passivity (as
analysed by the S.I.) has taken the form of a constant show of activity.
How about taking direct democracy at its word ?
According to its supporters, here is what direct democracy is aiming at :
[1] The respect of a majority.
[2] The expression of minorities, which are granted a large latitude of action.
[3] The possibility of free speech, in order to avoid pressure and violence: “Let’s
talk first.”
[4] The primacy of a collective will, not the will of an individual or of a handful of
persons.
[5] The respect of decisions taken in common.
Let’s take them one by one.
[1] Majority rule. A lot of social movements have been launched by a minority,
often a very small one. In the 1930s, at the time of large strikes by unskilled labour
in the US, two sit-downs involving about 10.000 people were started in Akron by
half a dozen workers. In 1936, at Goodyear, while the union was negotiating with
the boss about wages, 98 unskilled workers laid down tools, followed by 7.000
others, which forced the management to yield after 36 hours. One might object
that in all such cases, a minority only initiates actions soon taken up by a majority.
True, but this very fact shows how little relevant the majority criterion is.
The participants in a picket line put their interests (and the interest of labour as
whole) above the interests of the non-strikers: they do not respect the right to work
of those who want to work. Democrats might argue that the strike is supported by
a great majority of the workforce : that would be forgetting that democracy is also
the protector of minorities. By the way, what is a majority ? 51% ? 60% ? 95% ? We
are faced with the inadequacy of the self principle. “Let the workers themselves
decide…” Who’ll decide when a minority ceases to be a minority and starts
becoming a majority, and when a majority gets big enough to be considered as
the common will ?
[2] Minority rights. Any deep movement, whether for simple demands or more,
will pull along in its wake a number of yet undecided persons and ask them to
do what they did not previously feel like doing. When piqueteros go round the
neighbourhood and ask for 50 people to come and reinforce their road block, the
picket members are not acting as a boss summoning his personnel, or an army
officer calling his soldiers to order : they expect other proletarians to fulfil their
obligation to the piqueteros as well as to themselves.
There are differences between the bulk of the rank and file and its most active
elements: for these elements to turn into a new ruling elite in the plant and
possibly in society, it takes more than them initiating unrest on the shop floor.
Bureaucratization is nearly always the result of reformism, not the other way
round, and it can rise out of activist minorities as well as of consenting majorities.
The existence of a majority and a minority is not a valid enough indicator helping
us to assess a situation and to deal with it. The majority/minority duality functions
in combination as well as in opposition. Nobody ever thinks about this in a
vacuum. If you agree with a decision, you “naturally” tend to believe it comes out
of a sufficient number of people. Those who disagree are inclined to believe the
opposite: to them, this majority is not enough of a majority, they’d like another, a
more numerous one…
[3] Free speech. It’s pointless to wonder if speech takes place before, after or
during the act of rebellion. In 1936, in the General Motors plant at Toledo, all the
work force gathered for a general meeting but, as a participant said, “it was like
everyone had made up his mind before a single word was uttered”, and a sit-down
strike started. Those workers were not brainless robots. Exchanging words then
was unnecessary because it had taken place before, in hundreds of informal
discussions and small meetings. The action that was born out of them spoke for
itself.
If we equate democracy with exchange, these encounters can be called
democratic, but it was not the democratic principle that made it possible.
On the other hand, in many conflicts, urging the participants to get together and
speak can result in the movement becoming more aware of itself and stronger,
or losing its momentum when it was just starting to gather speed. An expression
which ceases to be action and experience dissolves into free-wheeling talk. In the
same way, looking for “more information” can be an excellent way of forgetting
the essential information: the common determination to fight on.
18
Unlike God’s Word that was turned into flesh, human words express ideas,
partake of events, strengthen (or sometimes weaken) our behaviour, but they do
not create.
A strike or a riot is forced to take action and to choose between options. But it
does not relate to them like a philosopher or scientist testing a set of hypotheses
and then, by mere reasoning and with no outside interference, opting for the
best. In a social movement, speech helps sort out what has been maturing in the
participants’ mind, in relation to their past and present.
Social critique usually rejects the secret ballot paper in favour of open public
voting that does not cut up the continuity of the voters’ action. The election
moment separates each voter from the others and from the rest of his life (the
polling booth is called an isolator in French). One of Thatcher’s main anti-strike
measures was to make it illegal to go on strike without a secret ballot procedure.
Nevertheless, history provides us with a many examples of people – and workers
– being manipulated by a public show of hands, a game in which Stalinists had
become experts.
The point we are making is that historical evolution is not the result of a majority
rule based on a confrontation of opinions and on the maximum availability and
sharing of information. This is NOT saying that information and discussion are
pointless. No act is sufficient in itself, nor is its meaning so obvious that it would
require no expression at all. In the General Motors, 1936, example mentioned
above, verbal exchange did occur, but before the decision to strike, and it
contributed to the decision. In such a case, respecting democracy would have
meant forcing a discussion upon the workforce: this may have revealed the
determination of the workers, or it may have deflected it. Debate is never good
or bad in itself.
[4] Common will. Democracy always presents itself as a protection, as the means
to secure non-violence among its participants, because democrats treat each
other as equals.
Acting on behalf of others does not necessarily turn anyone into a leader. Most
bureaucrats do not build up their authority by positioning themselves above the
mass, rather by sheltering behind the mass. A bureaucrat pretends to have no
personal ambition and to serve the interests of the rank and file. While we’re
certainly not looking for charismatic figures, there’s no need to be afraid of
individual initiatives either.
Insisting on community as a principle leaves us stuck with the majority versus
minority intractable dilemma already discussed. Among those who share a
common perspective, someone often becomes aware of an opportunity before
the others: trying to convince the others that this opportunity must be seized won’t
be a purely intellectual exercise. Arguments are going to be thrown about and it’s
likely there will be a conflict of wills at some point. Ideas won’t meet on neutral
ground until one is recognized as the best because of its inner logical superiority.
Truth belongs to no-one. It rushes and shoves. “Truth is as immodest as light (..)
It possesses me” (Marx, 1843). Consistency-reaching is not a peaceful process.
An essential idea shatters my certainties and does not come to me without some
violence. If democracy means choosing between options with the only guidance
of individual free will and not outside interference, then truth is not democratic.
Making it a principle of having any action decided upon by the whole group, and
then any change of action also debated and re-decided upon by a new group
meeting (or some general consultation), means no action. Those groups who
say they operate on such a total self-management basis only self-manage their
own speech.

[5] Everybody’s all for respecting common decisions… unless or until the decision
is deemed wrong.
In France, 1968, the Peugeot plant at Sochaux (at the time, one of the biggest
concentrations of skilled workers in that country) went on a sit-down strike on
May 20. When a great majority of the labour force voted to return to work on
June 10, a minority re-occupied the premises, and was violently expelled by the
police in the early hours of the 11th. At that moment, thousands on non-strikers
were arriving by bus for the morning shift: instead of resuming work as they had
intended to, they immediately joined the ex-occupiers and fought the police with
them for the whole day. Two workers got killed. Rumours later said that some
rioters had used guns, and that cops had been killed but the police would not
admit it. True or (probably) false, these rumours show how tough the fighting was.
The local working class lived the event as an outright confrontation with bosses
and State. The return to work only took place on June 20, and labour got a better
deal than had been granted nationally.
In other words, after voting to go back, a large proportion of the labour force not
only decided not to go back, but rallied what had been until then a minority of
isolated extremists. The first occupation had involved between 100 and 1.000
persons, out of a workforce of over 35.000, with 3.000 union members. True,
the general meetings could be called non-democratic: they took place under the
combined pressure of the CGT and the media. But the very fact of contradicting
one’s vote, and what’s more, without having had a proper meeting, shows that,
unlike what the democratic principle maintains, the debating and voting space-
time is not decisive.
What happened was not simply a reflex of instinctive worker solidarity. At the
Billancourt Renault plant, in 1972, the murder of a Maoist worker by a security
guard hardly caused any reaction among his work mates, who were indifferent
to what they saw as useless leftist troublemaking. In 1968, the Peugeot workers
felt they had something in common with a radical minority that was not alien to
them. Besides, a few years before, wildcat strikes had broken out at Sochaux,
often initiated by young workers. Also, during the first 1968 occupation, a
hundred radicals had set up a short lived “forum” that served as a medium for
open discussions on a variety of controversial issues. The June 11 eruption did
not come out of the blue : it had been prepared by past informal debates and
unofficial meetings, which (better than democratic procedures) paved the way for
an apparently spontaneous outburst. “Faceless resistance” is not just canteen or
coffee machine conversations: it serves as a springboard for open conflict.
Assessing these five criterions shows first that a lot of positive events have
happened without or against them, secondly that they have often failed to prevent
what they were supposed to prevent. None of the standards of direct democracy
really works.
Actually, a defender of direct democracy won’t ask for them to be fully implemented.
He might even agree with most of the points we’ve been making, but he’ll say
democratic standards are not to be taken as absolutes: it’s the guideline behind
them that matters, the motive, the impetus: “But if ye be led by the Spirit, ye are
not under the law.” (Saint Paul, Galatians, 5 : 18)
That’s the whole point : this tricky interplay between the letter and the spirit,
the law and the Spirit. There was no contradiction for Saint Paul. There is one
for democracy, because it is indeed the quest for formal criterions: it pretends
to give us rules of conduct that provide the best possible freedom. So this
sudden non-formality goes against how democracy defines itself. Democracy is
not the ad hoc running of social life. It’s communism that relies on the ability
of fraternal (non competitive, non profit-seeking, etc.) social relationships to
19
create the organization best fitted to them. Democracy is the exact opposite: it
sets procedures and institutions as a prerequisite and a condition of the rest. It
says society is based on its political organization (top down or bottom up). And
then, when experience proves democratic standards don’t work, democracy says
we can do without them… or even that we must do without them. Democracy
is there to solve conflicts, yet when they’re too serious, it can’t solve them any
more. What’s the use of a principle that can only be applied when social life runs
smoothly and we don’t need the principle ? Democracy functions as far as society
can remain democratic.
This letter versus spirit is a contradiction for democracy, but democratic rulers -
left or right – can manage it. They know perfectly well that democracy has to be
and will be suspended in times of crisis. Suspended partly, when Britain fought
the IRA. Or totally, when the Algerian army cancelled the 1991 elections after the
first round had been won by the Islamists, and took over power, with full support
from Western countries. The bourgeois have no qualms provisionally turning into
dictators… in the long-term interest of democracy: “no democracy for the anti-
democrats”. Being a lesser evil, democracy sometimes ceases to be democratic
to avoid a worse evil.
For radicals who believe in direct democracy, however, this contradiction is a trap:
they won’t get a full and permanent reality out of a system that can’t provide it.
Prioritizing direct democracy does not produce direct democracy. Whatever
positive content democracy (if we wish to keep the word) may have, can’t be the
result of democracy.
Contradiction in communist theory…
Even a cursory reading of Marx is enough to realize he was at the same time
a staunch supporter and an enemy of democracy. As his texts can be found in
paperback or on the Internet, a few very short quotes will suffice here.
Marx argues that democracy is the culmination of politics, and that a political
emancipation is partial, selfish, bourgeois emancipation, the emancipation of the
bourgeois. If, as he writes, “the democratic State [is] the real State”, assuming
we want a world without a State, we’ve got to invent a life with neither State nor
democracy. However, when Marx presents democracy as “the resolved mystery of
all constitutions”, whereby “The constitution appears as what it is, the free product
of men” (Critique of Hegel’s philosophy of Right, 1843), he is opposing real
democracy to the existence of the State, and therefore supporting democracy.
Besides, Marx was only indirectly addressing democracy through a critique of
bureaucracy, and targeting politics through the critique of the State, particularly
through its theorization by Hegel: “All forms of State have democracy for their
truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democratic.”
(Id.)
One last quote, interesting because it’s written decades after the early works,
and by someone who was coming close to admitting the possibility of a peaceful
transition to socialism: “One must never forget that the logical form of bourgeois
domination is precisely the democratic republic (..) The democratic republic
always remains the last form of bourgeois domination, the form in which it will
die.” (Engels, letter to Bernstein, March 14, 1884)
Intuitions leave much room for interpretation, and the context often blurs the
message. To understand these conflicting views, we must bear in mind that, in
the mid-19th century, a groundswell of social movements, from Ireland to Silesia,
was pressing for radical democratic demands and social demands, both at the
same time, combined and opposed, and this confrontation resulted in a critique
of politics as a separate sphere. Let’s not idealize our past. The same thinkers and
groups often mixed these demands and that critique. The purpose of The German
Ideology was to prove that history cannot be explained by the conflicts of ideas
or political platforms, but by the social relations by which human beings organize
their lives and, above all, by the material conditions of their lives. Those pages are
to be read in connection with The Jewish Question, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy
of Right, Contribution to the critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, The King of
Prussia & Social Reform, the Theses on Feuerbach and other similar texts which
address the democratic bourgeois revolution, but also the Rights of Man, and
reject a revolution that would only have “a political soul”. For example, Marx sees
1789 and especially the 1793-94 Terror in France as the culmination of political
will that deludes itself into believing it can change the world from the top. There’s
little doubt that Marx wished to apply his “materialist” method not only to history,
religion, philosophy and the economy, but also to the question of power and to
politics as a field of special knowledge, as separate science and technique. Yet at
the time he was describing the political sphere as another form of alienation, he
was also pressing on with the completion of the bourgeois democratic revolution,
and a few years later he became the editor of a liberal progressive paper, the
Neue Reinische Zeitung, subtitled “Organ Of Democracy”.
The deeper the communist movement goes, the higher its contradictions are.
Marx happens to be among the few thinkers who come closest to a synthesis
and therefore inevitably combine its most opposing elements, the dimensions our
movement is at most pain to reconcile. It’s no accident that Karl Marx should have
given one of the best approaches of communism (in particular, but not only, in his
early works) and welcomed the advent of capitalism as a world system.
…and contradiction in proletarian practice
If Marx was perhaps the writer who went the furthest in extolling and rejecting
democracy, it’s because he was a concentrated expression of the forced situation
in which the proletariat used to live and still lives. Intellectual discrepancies
mirror a practical dilemma which the proletarians have to solve to emancipate
themselves.
Like others in his time, like R. Luxemburg later, like the German Left after 1914-18,
Marx reflected a contradiction: the self-awareness and the “community culture”
(Selbstverständigung and Versammlungskultur, as they were called in Germany
around 1900), in the workplace and in the workers’ district, confront bourgeois
democracy with proletarian community. But using one’s condition as a major
weapon is a double-edged sword for the proletarians. Guy Debord may not be
the most acute critique of democracy, but he points to something essential in The
Society of the Spectacle, theses 87 & 88. The bourgeoisie was able to use its socio-
economic power as the main instrument of its political ascent. The proletarians
can’t use their social role to emancipate themselves, because this role is given to
them by capital. So their only radical weapon is their negative potential… closely
linked to the positive part they play in the reproduction of capital. The bourgeois
won by asserting themselves on the basis of what they already socially were. The
proletarians can only win by fighting against themselves, i.e. against what they are
forced to do and be as producers (and as consumers…). There’s no way out of
this contradiction. Or rather, the only way out is communist revolution.
It was enough for the bourgeois to get together and find the means to run society:
so creating suitable decision-making institutions was enough (though it took
centuries). It was not only for the sake of culture and knowledge that from the
18th century onward the ascending elites promoted networks of debating and
scientific societies, clubs, public libraries and museums, and of course a growing
press : the rising merchant and industrial classes were building up a new type of
sociability that helped them challenge monarchs and aristocrats. The proletarians
also need to get together : but for them, just getting together is staying within
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capitalism.
For what’s it worth, democratic reunion is enough for the bourgeoisie. The
proletariat needs something else. Proletarian self-organization which fails to
develop into a self-critique of wage-labour reinforces labour as the partner of the
capital-labour couple: the forced coupling goes on and so does the management
of the couple, hence the peaceful coexistence of opposites called democracy.
The partial, confused yet deep communist movement that developed in the first
half of the 19th century initiated an equally confused yet persistent critique of
democracy. Both movement and critique were soon pushed in the background by
the rise of organized labour that tried to make the most of bourgeois democracy.
Yet every time the movement re-emerged, it got back to basics, and revived some
aspects of the critique of democracy.
There’s no need to be an expert in Marxology to know that most of these
fundamentals fell into oblivion: some texts got hardly any response, while
others were put aside by Marx and Engels and published much later. The “real
movement”, as Marx called it, seemed to have very little use for these writings.
In the first half of the 20th century, new proletarian shock waves led to a reborn
critique that (re)discovered these long-forgotten intuitions, but failed to be up
to them. Indeed, Bolshevik practice after October 1917 could fall within Marx’s
critique of the French revolution and of Jacobinism. As for the worldwide 1960-80
earthquake, in spite, or rather because of its anti-bureaucratic stand, it turned
out to be a zenith of democracy (though, unlike the post-1917 period, there was
no revolutionary attempt to take over political power in the 1960s and 70s). The
theoretical inroads made over 150 years ago have yet to be taken up.
The democratic appeal
Democracy is attractive because it gives more than the right to select leaders
now and then. Its appeal is to provide everyone with the means to go beyond
the restricting circles of family, neighbourhood and work, and to interrelate,
to meet others, not just those who are close, but all those living on the same
territory, and possibly over the borders too. The democratic dream promises a
potential universality, the earthly realization of a brotherhood and sisterhood that
religion offers in its own way. Marx was not the only one to emphasize the intimate
connection between Christianity and the modern State: the former sees each
man as the bearer of an individual soul that makes him equal to others in spirit
(everyone can be saved); the latter sees each man as politically equal to others
(every citizen has a right to vote and be elected).
To fully appreciate the democratic appeal, we should bear in mind what existed
before, when formal (i.e. political) equality was unheard of. Not just the ruling
elite, but many thinkers and artists showed open contempt for the mass of
peasants and workmen that were thought of as an inferior species. Most famous
French writers treated the Paris Commune fighters as if they’d been outside or
below human standards. Until the mid-20th century, hatred of the workers was
widespread among the middle and upper classes, in Germany for instance.
1939-45 was the definitive taming of the rabble: with few exceptions, the toiling
masses of the world behaved in a patriotic way, so the bourgeois stopped being
scared of a populace that looked like it was accepting law and order at last, and
now nearly everyone in a Western-type democracy accepts at least verbally the
notion that one human being is worth another. Yet this equivalence is achieved
by comparing quantified items. In democratic capitalism, each human person is
my fellow being inasmuch as his vote and mine are added and then computed.
Modern citizenship is the bourgeois form of freedom.
A system which is not its own cause… nor its own cure
Democracy is not responsible for what is or what might be regarded as its positive
aspects. Universal franchise never created itself. Civil rights rarely came out of
elections or peaceful debates, but out of strikes, demonstrations, riots, usually
violent, often with bloodshed. Later, once installed, democracy forgets about
its origin and says “the source of power is not be found in the street”… where
indeed it came from. Politics claims to be the basis of social life, but it results from
causes that it merely structures. The advent of the Spanish republic in 1931 was
caused by decades of strife, rioting and class war that the new regime proved
incapable to control, and it took a civil war and a dictatorship to restore order.
After Franco’s death, the cooling down of social conflicts made possible the
transition to a parliamentary system that (unlike in the 1930s) could work as a
pacifier and conciliator.
Democrats contend that, contrary to dictatorship, democracy has the merit of
being able to correct itself. This is true so long as the mere balance of power
is upset. If the structure of political rule is in jeopardy, it’s a completely different
matter. As democracy has not got its cause in itself, neither has it got the remedy:
the solution has to come from outside electoral procedures and parliamentary
institutions. The subtleties of Capitol Hill political bargaining were unable to solve
the crisis between North and South in the 1860s: it took no less than a bloody
civil war, a forerunner of 20th century industrialized slaughter. It was not forums or
ballot papers that toppled Mussolini in 1943, but a succession of uncontrollable
strikes. It was not a return to the Weimar republic that put an end to Nazism, but
a world war. It was only when the French army illegally took over civilian power in
Algiers, May 1958, that in Paris politicians were forced to institute a more stable
political system, and started realizing the colonial era was over.
Democracy is a remarkable violence filter. But because it is born out of violence,
it only overcomes its tragedies by giving way to more violence. Biologists say that
one of the definitions of a life form is its ability at reproduction, organization and
reorganization. How politically, socially (and intellectually) valid is a phenomenon
that’s unable to explain itself and to cure itself ? How consistent is it ? What sort
of reality are democracy supporters talking about ?
And yet it holds out…
After nearly two centuries of electoral and parliamentary experiences, including
endeavours to make some revolutionary use of the universal franchise by radicals
from Proudhon to Lenin, and in spite of a thousand betrayals and renunciations of
its own principles, modern democracy still soldiers on… and thrives.
In a large part of the world, and in what is known as the developed or rich
countries, democracy remains a reality, and a desirable one, because it fits in with
the inner logic of the industrial, merchant and wage-labour civilization, therefore
with capitalism. Not all capitalism is democratic, far from it, as is shown by Stalin’s
Russia and Hitler’s Germany, and now by China. But the Third Reich and the
USSR yielded to their democratic rivals, and pluto-bureaucratic China’s boom
will only go on if it accepts substantial doses of freedom of speech. Capitalism is
economic competition and there can be no efficient competition among capital
(as well as an efficient labour market) without some competition in politics too.
Democracy is the most adequate political capitalist form.
Whether we like it or not, democracy is an excellent expression of life under
capitalism. It helps maintaining the degree of liberty and equality required by
capitalist production and consumption and, up to a point, also required by the
necessary forced relationship between labour and capital. While democracy is
one of the obstacles that stand in the way of communist revolution, it does serve
the interests of labour in its daily inevitable “reformist” action.
21
To put it bluntly, there’s no practical critique of democracy unless there’s a critique
of capitalism. Accepting or trying to reform capitalism implies accepting or trying
to reform its most adequate political form.
There’s no point in sorting out bad (bourgeois) democracy and good (direct,
worker, popular) democracy. But there’s no point either in declaring oneself
an anti-democrat. Democracy is not the Number One enemy, the ultimate
smokescreen that veils the proletarian eyes, the unveiling of which would at long
last clear the path to revolution. There are no “anti-democratic” specific actions to
be invented, no more than systematic campaigns against advertising billboards
or TV - both closely linked to democracy, actually.
The participants in millions of acts of resistance or of attack, be they strikes,
demonstrations, flying pickets, insurrections, are well aware that these practices
have little to do with parliamentary games, and indeed that they’re the exact
opposite of parliamentary games. Knowing it does not stop them from calling
such practices democratic, and from regarding these practices as the only
true democracy, because the participants consider as identical democracy
and collective freedom, democracy and self-organization. They say they are
practising true democracy because they self-manage their struggle, do away
with the separation between those represented and their representatives, and
because the general meeting (unlike parliament) is an assembly of equals: so
they often believe they are at last giving reality to what is /a sham/make belief/
in the bourgeois world. Each of them regards democracy as the fact of treating
his workmate, the person marching beside him, erecting a barricade with him, or
arguing with him in a public meeting, as a fellow human being.
It would be pointless for us to go into a head-on confrontation with him to try and
persuade him to stop using the word “democracy”. Democracy’s shortcoming
is to treat an indispensable element of revolutionary change as the primary
condition of change, or even as its essence. So, in future troubled times, our best
contribution will be to push for the most radical possible changes, which include
the destruction of the State machinery, and this “communization” process will
eventually help people realize that democracy is an alienated form of freedom. If
democracy means giving priority to form over content, only a transformation of
the social content will put back form where it belongs.
Whenever a movement keeps moving forward and confronting boss and State
power, it is not democratic. Democracy is the separation between action and
decision.
When, however, and this is bound to be often the case, the content of the
movement is compatible with “industrial dispute” arbitration and conciliation, then
it’s normal that form and procedure should come to the fore. In the eyes of nearly
all participants, organizing the general meeting according to rules becomes
more important than what the meeting decides. The meeting is seen as a cause
of the strike, more exactly as the cause of its continuation: because it can put
an end to the strike, it is now perceived of as its detonator. Reality is put on its
head. Democracy is the supremacy of means over the end, and the dissolution
of potentialities in forms. So when these workers ideologize their own behaviour
as democratic, they are not “wrong”: they reason according to the actual limits of
their behaviour.
When the fact of asking the rank and file for its opinion breaks the determination
of the rank and file, it’s usually because this determination has already declined.
In 1994, in one of its French plants, the energy and transport multinational Alstom
terminated a strike by calling for a referendum : the personnel voted to return to
work. The unions retaliated by having a second referendum: it confirmed the first.
“Company (or plant) democracy” was not killing the conflict, it was finishing it off.
In fact, after an initial militant phase, the strike had lost its vigour. By submitting
to an individual secret ballot, the workers confirmed they had ceased to think
of themselves as an acting collective. A community that agrees to give only
individual opinions no longer exists as a community.
Communism as activity
Equality is a vital tenet of democracy. Its starting point is the existence of individuals:
it compares them from a criterion, and wonders if each of them is either inferior
or superior to the other according to the chosen criterion. Old time democracy
contented itself with “One man, one vote”. Modern democrats will ask for equal
pay, equal rights in court, equal schooling, equal access to health service, equal
job offers, equal opportunity to create one’s business, equal social promotion,
some would say an equal share of existing wealth. As soon as we get into real
social and daily life, the list becomes endless and, to be comprehensive, it has
to be negative at some point : equality implies the right not to be discriminated
against on account of one’s sex, colour, sexual preferences, nationality, religion,
etc. The whole political spectrum could be defined by how much is included
in the list. Rightwing liberals might limit equality rights to electoral rights, while
far left reformists extend equality to a guaranteed substantial income, a home,
job protection, etc., in an endless debate between personal freedom and social
fairness. The rejection of, and the search for social (and not just political) equality
are two sides of the same coin. The obsession with equality is born out of a world
laden with inequality, a world that dreams of reducing inequality by giving more to
each individual, more rights… and more money.
Equality protects individuals. We’d rather start by considering what the members
of society are doing together, and what they have and don’t have in common.
Human beings lose their mastery over the running of their personal and group
life when they lose the mastery over their conditions of existence, and first of all
over the production of the material basis of these conditions. Our problem is not
to find how to make common decisions about what we do, but to do what can
be decided upon in common, and to stop or avoid doing whatever cannot be
decided upon in common. A factory run according to Taylor’s methods, a nuclear
power station, a multinational or the BBC will never come under the management
of its personnel. Only a bank that confines itself to micro-credit can remain under
some degree of control by the people working there and by those who receive
its micro-loans. When a co-op operates on a scale that enables it to rival large
companies, its special “democratic” features begin to fade. A school can be self-
managed (by staff and schoolkids) as long as it refrains from selecting, grading
and streaming. That is fine, and it’s probably better to be a teenager in Summerhill
than at Eton, but that won’t change the school system.
Whoever does not situate the problem of power where it belongs, is bound to
leave it in the hands of those who possess power, or to try and share it with them
(as social-democracy does), or to take power from them (as Lenin and his party
did).
The essence of political thought is to wonder how to organize people’s lives,
instead of considering first what those to-be-organized people do.
Communism is not a question of finding the government or self-government best
suited to social reorganization. It is not a matter of institutions, but of activity.
Self is not enough
It seems only die-hard party builders could object to autonomy: who wants to be
a dependant ? Yet we may wonder why autonomy has become a buzzword lately.
Trotskysts are not authoritarian any more. Any leftwinger now is all for “autonomy”,
like nearly every politician looking for working class vote talked of “socialism” in
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1910. The popularity of this notion may be a sign of growing radicalism. It certainly
also has a lot to do with contemporary daily life and the spaces of freedom it
grants us: more open communication channels, new types of leisure, new ways
of meeting, making friends and travelling, the “network society”, the Internet,
etc. All these activities have one thing in common: everyone is at the same time
constantly on his own and constantly relating to everyone and everything.
No revolution without autonomy: quite ! Autonomy is necessary. But it’s not enough.
It is not the principle on which everything can or must be based. Autonomy means
giving oneself one’s own law (nomos). It’s based on the self (auto).
Is this what happens in real life ?
Everybody wishes collective decisions. So do we. And the best way to get it is
for each of us to take part in the decision-making. But once you and I are part of
it, we still have to make the decision. Is this “self” strong enough ? Autonomists
have their answer ready; the individual self may be weak, but the collective self is
strong. Who’s being naïve here ? Adding individual wills only transforms them into
something qualitatively different if and when they act differently. So we’re back to
where we started. Aggregating selves widens the scope of the problem without
solving it. The solution can only come, not from what autonomy is supposed to
give us, but from what it is founded upon. Autonomy in itself is no more creative
than any form of organization.
Many radicals believe in the equation –
autonomy + anti-State violence = revolutionary movement
and see it vindicated for instance in the Oaxaca protracted insurrection. While
this event is one of the strongest outbursts of proletarian activity in the recent
years, it demonstrates that autonomous violence is necessary and insufficient.
A revolutionary movement is more than a liberated area or a hundred liberated
areas. It develops by fighting public and private repression, as well as by starting
to change the material basis of social relationship. No self-managed street fighting
and grassroots district solidarity, however indispensable they are, inevitably
contain the acts and the intentions that bring about such a change. So it’s the
nature of the change we’ve got to insist upon: creating a world without money,
without commodity exchange, without labour being bought and sold, without
firms as competing poles of value accumulation, without work as separate from
the rest of our activities, without a State, without a specialized political sphere
supposedly cut off from our social relationships… In other words, a revolution that
is born out of a common refusal to submit, out of the hope to get to a point of no
return where people transform themselves and gain a sense of their own power
as they transform reality.
P.S. 1
The best concise pamphlet on the subject that we know of is Communism
Against Democracy, Treason Press, Canberra, Australia, 2005, composed of two
texts by Wildcat (Britain) and Against Sleep And Nightmare (US). Available on the
Treason website.
See also J. Camatte, The Democratic mystification, 1969.
P.S. 2 for (possible) political correctors.
Most of the time, this essay uses “he” and “man” as a means to say “he & she”,
“man & woman”. This is not out of neglect of the other half of our species. This
he does not mean male. It’s the grammatical neuter which encompasses both
masculine and feminine. We’re well aware that no grammar is socially or sexually
neutral. A better society will create better words. For the time being, the old
fashioned neuter form has at least the advantage of not giving us the illusion of
false equality in speech. The reader who’s gone that far would not expect us to
believe in democracy in language.